Louis D. Brandeis Quotes

… the process of social change was not merely a matter of new inventions pressing on old institutions: it was a matter of new classes displacing old.

I'm not any kind of social reformer.

You must be the change you wish to see in the world.

For politics to change … culture must change too --- and that takes much more than dispatching troops, holding elections, and writing constitutions.

Human society can only adapt to social change at a certain rate.

You can't find your way to social reform through the forces that made social reform necessary.

I want to be known as a catalyst for change.

Time only and long experience can bring remedies to defects in the customs of a state whose form is already determined.

Courts should ... follow, rather than lead, changes taking place elsewhere in society.

[T]he great social changes are impossible without the feminine ferment.

Great economic and social forces flow with a tidal sweep over communities that are only half conscious of them. Wise statesmen are those who foresee what time is thus bringing, and endeavor to shape institutions and to mold men's thought and purpose in accordance with the change that is silently surrounding them.

Reform is born of need, not pity. No vital movement of the people has worked down, for good or evil; fermented, instead, it carried up the heaving, cloggy mass.

Governments never lead; they follow progress

The goal in the end is not to win elections. The goal is to change society.

Most governments and people want reform. It’s the prospect of change that makes reform rare.

The period of radical reform is finished.

Change America—Change the World

I do not believe that the Great Society is the ordered, changeless, and sterile battalion of ants.

Society has to change, but the political powers we have at the moment are not enough to effect this change. The whole democratic system would have to be rethought.

An institution or reform movement that is not selfish, must originate in the recognition of some evil that is adding to the sum of human suffering, or diminishing the sum of happiness.

The modern period adds social ethics to religions agenda, for we now realize that social structures are not like laws of nature. They are human creations, so we are responsible for them.

The typical journalist's typical lead for the typical Canadian story nowadays is along this line: that Canadians are hard at work trying to gain a reputation as a nation of rapid social change.

I'm trying to change the world.

The courts may be the most important instrument for social, economic, and political change.

Progressive change in this country has never come from above.