Louis Brandeis Quotes

If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.

There must be opportunities for judgment to mature. When, therefore, you increase your business to a very great extent, and the multitude of problems increase with its growth, you will find, in the first place, that the man at the head has a diminishing knowledge of the facts and, in the second place, a diminishing opportunity of exercising a careful judgment upon them.

For a while he trampled with impunity on laws human and divine; but, as he was obsessed with the delusion that two and two make five, he fell, at last, a victim of the relentless rules of humble arithmetic. "Remember, O Stranger, Arithmetic is the first of the sciences and the mother of safety".

[N]o people ever did or ever can attain a worthy civilization by the satisfaction merely of material needs . . .

It is, as a rule, far more important how men pursue their occupation than what the occupation is which they select.

What I have desired to do is to make the people of Boston realize that the most important office, and the one which all of us can and should fill, is that of private citizen. The duties of the office of private citizen cannot under a republican form of government be neglected without serious injury to the public.

When a man feels that he cannot leave his work, it is a sure sign of an impending collapse.

The bow must be strung and unstrung . . . there must be time also for the unconscious thinking which comes to the busy man in his play.

The intensity and complexity of life, attendant upon advancing civilization, have rendered necessary some retreat from the world.