Felix Frankfurter Quotes
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No court can make time stand still.
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Ambiguity lurks in generality and may thus become an instrument of severity.
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Gratitude is one of the least articulate of the emotions, especially when it is deep.
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It must take account of what it decrees for today in order that today may not paralyze tomorrow.
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A phrase begins life as a literary expression; its felicity leads to its lazy repetition; and repetition soon establishes it as a legal formula, undiscriminatingly used to express different and sometimes contradictory ideas.
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I do take law very seriously, deeply seriously, because fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalized medium of reason, that's all we have standing between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feeling.
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To be effective, judicial administration must not be leaden-footed.
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Morals are three-quarters manners.
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It would be a narrow conception of jurisprudence to confine the notion of 'laws' to what is found written on the statute books, and to disregard the gloss which life has written upon it.
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As a member of this court I am not justified in writing my private notions of policy into the Constitution, no matter how deeply I may cherish them or how mischievous I may deem their disregard.
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The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards.
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The mode by which the inevitable is reached is effort.
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The words of the Constitution … are so unrestricted by their intrinsic meaning or by their history or by tradition or by prior decisions that they leave the individual Justice free, if indeed they do not compel him, to gather meaning not from reading the Constitution but from reading life.
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The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes.
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If nowhere else, in the relation between Church and State, 'good fences make good neighbors.'
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It has not been unknown that judges persist in error to avoid giving the appearance of weakness and vacillation.
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Judicial judgment must take deep account of the day before yesterday in order that yesterday may not paralyze today.
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National unity is the basis of national security. To deny the legislature the right to select appropriate means for its attainment presents a totally different order of problem from that of the propriety of subordinating the possible ugliness of littered streets to the free expression opinion through handbills.
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Is that which was deemed to be of so fundamental a nature as to be written into the Constitution to endure for all times to be the sport of shifting winds of doctrine?
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The most constructive way of resolving conflicts is to avoid them.
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Answers are not obtained by putting the wrong question and thereby begging the real one.
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Congress is, after all, not a body of laymen unfamiliar with the commonplaces of our law. This legislation was the formulation of the two Judiciary Committees, all of whom are lawyers, and the Congress is predominately a lawyers' body.
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Old age and sickness bring out the essential characteristics of a man.
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In the first place, lawyers better remember they are human beings, and a human being who hasn't his periods of doubts and distresses and disappointments must be a cabbage, not a human being. That is number one.