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.
Man is a wonder to himself; he can neither govern nor know himself.
For ages this idea has been proclaimed in the consummately wise teachings of religion, probably not alone as a means of insuring peace and harmony among men, but as a deeply founded truth. The Buddhist expresses it in one way, the Christian in another, but both say the same: We are all one.
Judaism boasts of no exclusive revelation of eternal truths that are indispensable to salvation, of no revealed religion in the sense in which that term is usually understood.
Because we cannot accept the truth of transience, we suffer.
Intellectual freedom is the only guarantee of a scientific - democratic approach to politics, economic development, and culture.
In a healthy, normal society, people can disagree with one another, even have diametrically opposing views, and this does not at all mean that they must hate one another. The Polish authorities, however, have made the division of Poles their primary task.
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