Those who won our independence believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty.

Louis D. Brandeis used this formulation in the context of defending civil liberties as a core American inheritance. The line is associated with his judicial writing on the U.S. Supreme Court, where he often invoked the Founders’ ideals to argue that constitutional freedoms are not merely procedural but essential to human flourishing. In particular, it is commonly linked to his famous dissent in a case upholding restrictions on speech during wartime, where he contrasted fear-driven repression with the Founders’ confidence that liberty requires public courage and vigilance. The quote functions as a historical appeal: independence was won by people who accepted risk, and the same spirit is needed to preserve liberty.

Brandeis links three civic virtues in a chain: happiness depends on liberty, and liberty in turn depends on courage. The first claim treats freedom not merely as a political arrangement but as a condition for human flourishing—room to think, speak, work, and live without arbitrary restraint. The second claim insists that such freedom is never self-sustaining: it requires citizens willing to defend rights, tolerate dissent, and accept the risks of self-government. Read together, the sentence is both commemorative and admonitory—praising the founders’ ideals while warning later generations that comfort, fear, or passivity can erode the very liberties that make happiness possible.