Louis D. Brandeis Freedom Quotations

Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent.

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.

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.

If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.

The greatest menace to freedom is an inert people.

It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.

The constitutional right of free speech has been declared to be the same in peace and war. In peace, too, men may differ widely as to what loyalty to our country demands, and an intolerant majority, swayed by passion or by fear, may be prone in the future, as it has been in the past, to stamp as disloyal opinions with which it disagrees.