Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Democracy, Freedom of Speech and Wealth

Found this 2 pieces of timeless words from Louis Brandeis, US Supreme Court Justice

On Democracy and Wealth
"We can have a democratic society or we can have great concentrated wealth in the hands of a few. We cannot have both"

On Freedom of Speech

"Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the state was to make men free to develop their faculties, and that in its government the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary.

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.

They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that without free speech and assembly discussion would be futile; that with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty; and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government.

- Louis Brandeis, US Supreme Court Justice, 1927

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