Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent.
Interpretation
Liberty must be guarded even when the government seems to have good intentions.
This quote by Louis D. Brandeis emphasizes the importance of vigilance in protecting individual freedoms, particularly when government actions appear to be benevolent. It suggests that the potential for overreach or infringement on liberty exists even under the guise of beneficial intentions, highlighting the need for constant scrutiny and defense of personal freedoms.
In practice
In a speech about civil rights, one might quote this to stress the importance of safeguarding freedoms even in times of seemingly just governance.
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.
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.
Identify the dominant philosophy of a society and you can predict its future.
The world is all alike. Those that seem better than their neighbours are only more artful. They mean the same thing, though they take a different road.
Action is an attempt to substitute a more satisfactory state of affairs for a less satisfactory one. We call such a willfully induced alteration an exchange.
A good style must, first of all, be clear. It must not be mean or above the dignity of the subject. It must be appropriate.
Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities.
His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be
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