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.
Interpretation
Liberty is most at risk when well-intentioned government actions go unchecked.
This quote by Louis D. Brandeis emphasizes the importance of remaining vigilant about our freedoms, especially when the government's intentions seem benevolent. It highlights a paradox where the greatest threat to liberty can come not from outright tyranny, but from those who act out of zeal and goodwill, yet lack a deep understanding of the implications of their actions on individual freedoms.
In practice
In a speech on civil rights, one might refer to this quote to emphasize the need for ongoing vigilance against the erosion of freedoms.
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.
If you will just start with the idea that this is a hard world, it will all be much simpler.
The only obligation I recognize is to say what I believe to be true [ ] and to say it with kindness. I believe that is how a Christian conversation should proceed.
Very few of us can now place ourselves in the mental condition in which even such philosophers as the great Descartes were involved in the days before Newton had announced the true laws of the motion of bodies.
Any nation that thinks more of its ease and comfort than its freedom will soon lose its freedom; and the ironical thing about it is that it will lose its ease and comfort too.
What makes life worthwhile is having a big enough objective, something which catches our imagination and lays hold of our allegiance, and this the Christian has in a way that no other person has. For what higher, more exalted, and more compelling goal can there be than to know God?
Which of us can resist the temptation of being thought indispensable?
Do ask yourself why you, the individual, exist, and if you can get no other answer try for once to justify the meaning of your existence as it were a posteriori by setting before yourself an aim, a goal, a 'to this end', an exalted and noble 'to this end'.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.