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.
Yes, and the body has a memory. The physical carriage hauls more than its weight. The body is the threshold across which each objectionable call passes into consciousness—all the unintimidated, unblinking, and unflappable resilience does not erase the moments lived through, even as we are eternally stupid or everlastingly optimistic, so ready to be inside, among, a part of the games.
Prayer is not a pious decoration of life but the breath of human existence.
Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.
We could present spatially an atomic fact which contradicted the laws of physics, but not one which contradicted the laws of geometry.
From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.
The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position.
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