Statement to a reporter in the Boston Record, 14 April 1903. (quoted in Alpheus Thomas Mason, Brandeis: A Free Man's Life (1946), p. 122.)
Commonly paraphrased as "The most important office is that of the private citizen" or "The most important political office is that of the private citizen", and sometimes misattributed to his dissenting opinion in Olmstead v. United States.
Extra-judicial writings
“Duty is the great business of a sea officer; all private considerations must give way to it, however painful it may be.”
Letter to Frances Nisbet [citation needed]
1800s
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Horatio Nelson 38
Royal Navy Admiral 1758–1805Related quotes
1924. Quoted in H. Blair Neatby, William Lyon Mackenzie King (Methuen, 1963), p. 40.
1920s
The Decorative Arts (1877)
Context: To give people pleasure in the things they must perforce use, that is one great office of decoration; to give people pleasure in the things they must perforce make, that is the other use of it.
Does not our subject look important enough now? I say that without these arts, our rest would be vacant and uninteresting, our labour mere endurance, mere wearing away of body and mind.
Our Chief Magistrate and His Powers (Columbia University Press, 1916)
“Great promptness in the report of all derelictions of duty, that evils may be at once corrected.”
Report of the Superintendent of the New York and Erie Railroad to the Stockholders (1856)
Solidarity in Liberty: The Workers' Path to Freedom (1867)
Context: What all other men are is of the greatest importance to me. However independent I may imagine myself to be, however far removed I may appear from mundane considerations by my social status, I am enslaved to the misery of the meanest member of society. The outcast is my daily menace. Whether I am Pope, Czar, Emperor, or even Prime Minister, I am always the creature of their circumstance, the conscious product of their ignorance, want and clamoring. They are in slavery, and I, the superior one, am enslaved in consequence.
“Madam, I may be President of the United States, but my private life is nobody's damn business.”
To a temperance reformer.
Quoted in Gentleman Boss: The Life of Chester Alan Arthur, ch. 8, Thomas C. Reeves (1975).
1880s