14 quotes
To humanize or glorify a man is one thing; to grasp his place in the history of the human spirit is quite another.
Public Journal (1945)
The real sadness of fifty is not that you change so much but that you change so little.
The Unfinished Country (1959)
The tourist who moves about to see and hear and open himself to all the influences of the places which condense centuries of human greatness is only a man in search of excellence.
The so-called lessons of history are for the most part the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors.
It Is Later Than You Think: The Need for a Militant Democracy (1939)
Life is a protracted struggle against the Adversary, who is man himself.
A President is best judged by the enemies he makes when he has really hit his stride.
The Unfinished Country (1959)
No American has a constitutional duty to like all or any of his fellow-Americans. Although I must add as a footnote that to dislike someone before you know him seems to me stupid.
Public Journal (1945)
The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word... To reject the word is to reject the human search.
The Unfinished Country (1959)
We should be less concerned about the missile gap than the intelligence gap... less worried about the missile race than the intelligence race.
The teen-age years have been at once the despair and fascination of novelists and playwrights. They are the gawkiest years of life, and the most precarious, with stirrings of beauty and desire and adventure, all of them this side of the articulate.
Public Journal (1945)
Create experimental mixed units of volunteers in the Army and Navy. No one need be forced into them. But there are plenty of Americans, white and black, who would want to give democracy a chance in the armed forces.
Public Journal (1945)
You will say, this is a long road. Injustice is longer. You will say, this is drastic. Bloodshed and hate are more drastic. You will say, it can't be done. But that is just what the enemies of American life are counting on you to say.
Public Journal (1945)
I have believed in love and work, and their linkage. I have believed that we are neither angels nor devils, but humans, with clusters of potentials in both directions. I am neither an optimist nor pessimist, but a possibilist.
Years from now, when historians can look back and put our time into perspective, they will say that of its towering figures—more truly great than generals and diplomats, business grants and labor grants, bigger than most of our presidents—was a man called Brandeis.