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.'
Interpretation
The quote expresses a complex relationship between identity, pride, and achievement within the Jewish community.
Louis D. Brandeis reflects on the duality of pride and identity within the Jewish culture. He suggests that despite differences in faith or belief, individuals of Jewish heritage are celebrated for their achievements and intellect, highlighting a sense of collective pride that transcends religious adherence. This speaks to the broader themes of identity and the recognition of merit beyond strict definitions.
In practice
A speaker at a cultural event discussing Jewish contributions to art and science could use this quote to highlight pride in Jewish heritage.
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.
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.
Time and again we see leaders and members of religions incite aggression, fanaticism, hate, and xenophobia - even inspire and legitimate violent and bloody conflicts.
All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess.
Lord, give me firmness without hardness, steadfastness without dogmatism, love without weakness.
If we have been pleased with life, we should not be displeased with death, since it comes from the hand of the same master.
Those who wish to seek out the cause of miracles and to understand the things of nature as philosophers, and not to stare at them in astonishment like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and proclaimed as such by those whom the mob adores as the interpreters of nature and the gods.
Of all the things of a man's soul which he has within him, justice is the greatest good and injustice the greatest evil.
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