Daily Inspiration Quote by Louis D. Brandeis

Brandeis is doing something deceptively radical here: he treats fear not as a civic excuse but as a civic hazard. The line rejects the perennial argument that safety, or the possibility of violence, gives the state license to clamp down on speech and assembly. His target is the reflexive “better safe than sorry” logic that governments reach for when dissent gets loud, messy, or unpopular. By saying “fear of serious injury alone cannot justify oppression,” he doesn’t deny danger exists; he denies fear’s authority.

The witch-burning example is a surgical piece of moral jujitsu. Brandeis drags the reader to a scene where “public safety” collapses into superstition and cruelty, reminding us that collective panic has historically dressed itself up as protection. “Men feared witches and burnt women” is not antique trivia; it’s an accusation about how majorities manufacture threats and then punish the vulnerable to feel in control. The subtext: today’s “dangerous speakers” can be yesterday’s “witches,” and the state is often a willing accomplice.

Context matters: Brandeis wrote in an America anxious about radicals, labor unrest, and wartime disloyalty, when courts were asked to bless censorship as a public-order measure. He reframes speech as a social technology for reality-testing. Speech, in his telling, is not merely a right to be tolerated; it’s the mechanism by which a democracy detoxes from irrational fear. Suppress it, and the fear doesn’t disappear - it metastasizes into policy.