Crime is contagious....if the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes that when authority figures violate the law, it undermines respect for legal systems among the public.
Louis D. Brandeis's quote highlights the principle that the behavior of those in power significantly influences societal attitudes towards the law. If the government itself engages in illegal acts, it sets a precedent that can lead citizens to disregard laws, fostering a culture of disrespect and lawlessness. This reflects the importance of integrity and accountability in governance as essential to maintaining public trust and adherence to laws.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the importance of ethics in leadership during a political seminar.
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.
Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the state was to make men free to develop their faculties... They valued liberty both as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty... that public discussion is a political duty; and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government.
Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent.
When those of Jewish blood exhibit moral or intellectual superiority, genius or special talent, we feel pride in them, even if they have abjured the faith like Spinoza, Marx, Disraeli or Heine. Despite the meditations of pundits or the decrees of council, our own instincts and acts, and those of others, have defined for us the term 'Jew.'
In business, the earning of profit is something more than an incident of success. It is an essential condition of success. It is an essential condition of success because the continued absence of profit itself spells failure.
America has believed that in differentiation, not in uniformity, lies the path of progress. It acted on this belief; it has advanced human happiness, and it has prospered.
It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling.
One must confront vague ideas with clear images.
As immigrants, we understand better than most that to be an American is a privilege that conveys not just rights but responsibilities.
The Autocrat of all the Russias will resign his crown, and proclaim his subjects free republicans sooner than will our American masters voluntarily give up their slaves.
The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around.
There is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who comes along.
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