No system of regulation can safely be substituted for the operation of individual liberty as expressed in competition.
Interpretation
Individual liberty and competition are essential for a functioning system; regulations cannot replace them.
This quote by Louis D. Brandeis highlights the importance of individual liberty and competition in society. It suggests that while regulations may be necessary, they cannot fully replace the benefits that come from individual freedom and the natural competition it fosters. True progress and innovation arise from allowing individuals to exercise their liberties in a competitive environment, rather than relying solely on imposed rules and regulations.
In practice
This quote can be used in a political debate to argue against excessive regulations.
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.
Why should workers agree to be slaves in a basically authoritarian structure? They should have control over it themselves. Why shouldn't communities have a dominant voice in running the institutions that affect their lives?
There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves, but it were much better to make such good provisions by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and of dying for it.
Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.
Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.
Any religion is forever in danger of petrifaction into mere ritual and habit, though ritual and habit be essential to religion.
Man would indeeded be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.
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