The most important office, and the one which all of us can and should fill, is that of private citizen.
Interpretation
Being an engaged private citizen is vital for democracy and society.
Louis D. Brandeis emphasizes the significance of the role of a private citizen in the functioning of a democracy. This quote highlights that every individual has the power and responsibility to participate in civic life, making informed decisions and contributing to the betterment of society.
In practice
Using this quote in a civic engagement seminar to inspire attendees to take action.
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 was the 31st of August in 1962 that eighteen of us traveled twenty-six miles to the county courthouse in Indianola to try to register to become first-class citizens. We was met in Indianola by policemen, Highway Patrolmen, and they only allowed two of us in to take the literacy test at the time.
Every state begins in compulsion; but the habits of obedience become the content of conscience, and soon every citizen thrills with loyalty to the flag. The citizen is right; for however the state begins, it soon becomes an indispensable prop to order.
Religion is so frequently a source of confusion in political life, and so frequently dangerous to democracy, precisely because it introduces absolutes into the realm of relative values.
Your paycheck is not your employer's responsibility, it's your responsibility. Your employer has no control over your value, but you do.
Brothers and sisters, our democracy has been hijacked. Brothers and sisters, all electoral freedoms in this country are over so long as it's controlled by corporations. Brothers and sisters, we are not going to allow these streets to be taken over by the Democrats or the Republicans. Because it's all of us who have built this city, and we can tear it down unless they give us what we need.
In my view, the composer,_x000D_ just as the poet, the sculptor or the painter,_x000D_ is in duty bound to serve Man, the people._x000D_ He must beautify life and defend it._x000D_ He must be a citizen first and foremost,_x000D_ so that his art might consciously extol human life_x000D_ and lead man to a radiant future.
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