Brandeis Quotes

The hand that rules the press, the radio, the screen, and the far spread magazine, rules the country.

Mr. Brandeis is perfectly infatuated with the work that you have done along the lines of Zionism. It would have done your heart good to have heard him assert what a valuable contribution to the cause your document is. In fact he agrees with me that you are the Father of Zionism, as your work antedates Herzl.

But as I wrote the book [Louis D. Brandeis: American Prophet], I tried to write it as clearly and directly and passionately as possible just thinking of communicating to readers who might want to learn about this great thinker and be inspired by him as I was.

[Louis] Brandeis is often painted as an acolyte of judicial restraint, or the view that judges should uphold laws whether or not they like them.

The tyranny of Harvard and Yale is another thing that transcends this problem of the set point. But what's so striking about [Louis] Brandeis is he had this vision of cultural pluralism that completely gave the lie to the idea that there was any inconsistency between being Jewish or being a woman or being African American and being fully American.

I think I've established my own identity here at Brandeis.

I'd say that [Louis] Brandeis practiced a kind of a "living originalism," to use the title of Jack Balkin's great book. He said you start with the paradigm case, which in the case of the Fourth Amendment was these general warrants or writs of assistance, but you define it at a level of abstraction that you can take it into our age and make it our own.

We shouldn't let the Republicans off the hook. Theodore Roosevelt, we learned from Jeff Cowan's new book, was just as bad as certainly [Louis] Brandeis was, or many Democrats were on the question of segregation.

I strongly recommend that this Administration allow states that have chosen to legalize medical marijuana to enact strong regulations without fear of prosecution... Especially if we believe that, as Justice Brandeis said, states are the 'laboratories of democracy,' we should not interfere with the will of the people to enact these compassionate laws

I remember when I was at Brandeis, Geoffrey Wolff, he was a great fiction-writing teacher. He was the writer-in-residence, and for those of us who wanted to be writers, you were so excited to be in the same hallway as him.

Louis Brandeis was not a racist like Woodrow Wilson.

Long and unchallenged control in everything in the Commonwealth has given many of these gentlemen the perfectly natural feeling that whosoever is not approved by them is ipso facto a person who is either 'dangerous' or lacking in 'judicial temperament' .... They simply cannot realize, and do not, that a long New England ancestry is not prima facie a trusteeship for everything in New England. That is in my judgment the real spring of most of the opposition.

The majority opinions [of the Supreme Court] determined the cases but these dissenting opinions will determine the minds of the future.

What is so inspiring about [Louis] Brandeis's writing is he saw it as a tool for democratic education. He would say things like the opinion is now convincing, now can we make it more instructive, after he'd gone through ten drafts.

For [Louis] Brandeis, you know, ethnicity and background are much less important than facts and reason. And he believes that far from wanting to efface our diversity of perspectives, we have to embrace it because that makes us more American, not less. In that sense, he's incredibly modern in an age of cultural pluralism. And it is disappointing for just the reasons you say that not everyone has embraced his pluralistic vision.