"There are no shortcuts in evolution"
About this Quote
Brandeis lands the line like a judicial gavel on America’s favorite fantasy: that progress can be purchased, hurried, or engineered around the hard parts. “There are no shortcuts in evolution” sounds biological, but it’s really civic. Coming from a judge who watched industrial capitalism race ahead of regulation, the sentence doubles as a warning to a country addicted to novelty and impatient with consequence. Evolution is the slow accretion of adaptation under pressure; Brandeis repurposes that logic for institutions, rights, and public trust.
The intent is disciplining. In law and democracy, he implies, legitimacy isn’t a hack. You don’t get stable reforms by leaping over deliberation, precedent, or the messy trial-and-error of practice. Brandeis was famous for his empiricism and for insisting that facts about real life belong in legal reasoning (the “Brandeis Brief”). The subtext: evidence, time, and friction are not bureaucratic obstacles; they are the mechanism by which societies learn. Try to bypass them and you don’t get efficiency, you get brittleness.
The context sharpens the cynicism. In an era of monopolies, mass advertising, and rapid technological change, “shortcut” reads like a corporate sales pitch. Brandeis rejects the idea that human systems can be optimized like machines without paying a moral cost. The sentence also flatters no one: reformers craving overnight transformation and power brokers chasing painless control are both told the same thing. If you want durable change, you earn it the slow way - through accumulated adjustments, not theatrical leaps.
The intent is disciplining. In law and democracy, he implies, legitimacy isn’t a hack. You don’t get stable reforms by leaping over deliberation, precedent, or the messy trial-and-error of practice. Brandeis was famous for his empiricism and for insisting that facts about real life belong in legal reasoning (the “Brandeis Brief”). The subtext: evidence, time, and friction are not bureaucratic obstacles; they are the mechanism by which societies learn. Try to bypass them and you don’t get efficiency, you get brittleness.
The context sharpens the cynicism. In an era of monopolies, mass advertising, and rapid technological change, “shortcut” reads like a corporate sales pitch. Brandeis rejects the idea that human systems can be optimized like machines without paying a moral cost. The sentence also flatters no one: reformers craving overnight transformation and power brokers chasing painless control are both told the same thing. If you want durable change, you earn it the slow way - through accumulated adjustments, not theatrical leaps.
Quote Details
| Topic | Perseverance |
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