We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the conflict between concentrated wealth and true democracy.
Brandeis suggests that a society can either prioritize democratic principles, where power is distributed among the many, or allow immense wealth to accumulate in the hands of a select few, which undermines democratic governance. The implications of this statement raise concerns about economic disparity and its detrimental effects on political equality and representation.
In practice
This quote can be used in a political rally to emphasize the need for economic reforms.
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.
People who have a sense of peace that their priorities are in the right place also have a sense of humility and a realistic view on life.
Inside the Bible's pages lie the answers to all the problems that mankind has ever known. I hope Americans will read and study the Bible.
...Therefore it is said: 'The perception of a phenomenon IS the perception of the Universal Nature, since phenomena and Mind are one and the same.'
Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.
Death is but a passage. It is not a house, it is only a vestibule. The grave has a door on its inner side.
People consider the harms they inflict to be justified and forgettable, and the harms they suffer to be unprovoked and grievous.
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