Felix Frankfurter Quotes
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The line must follow some direction of policy, whether rooted in logic or experience. Lines should not be drawn simply for the sake of drawing lines.
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I know of no title that I deem more honorable than that of Professor of the Harvard Law School.
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Decisions of this Court do not have intrinsic authority.
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Anybody can decide a question if only a single principle is in controversy.
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There is torture of mind as well as body; the will is as much affected by fear as by force. And there comes a point where this Court should not be ignorant as judges of what we know as men.
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Litigation is the pursuit of practical ends, not a game of chess.
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It is anomalous to hold that in order to convict a man the police cannot extract by force what is in his mind, but can extract what is in his stomach.
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Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.
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Holmes said Emerson had a beautiful voice, and, of course, Holmes had one of the most beautiful voices the Lord ever put into a throat.
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The mark of a truly civilized man is confidence in the strength and security derived from the inquiring mind.
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To some lawyers, all facts are created equal.
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It is a wise man who said that there is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals.
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I came into the world a Jew, and although I did not live my life entirely as a Jew, I think it is fitting that I should leave as a Jew. I don't want to turn my back on a great and noble heritage.
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The ultimate touchstone of constitutionality is the Constitution itself and not what we have said about it.
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It simply is not true that war never settles anything.
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A court which yields to the popular will thereby licenses itself to practice despotism, for there can be no assurance that it will not on another occasion indulge its own will.
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In a democratic society like ours, relief must come through an aroused popular conscience that sears the conscience of the people's representatives.
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Of compelling consideration is the fact that words acquire scope and function from the history of events which they summarize.
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The eternal struggle in the law between constancy and change is largely a struggle between history and reason, between past reason and present needs.
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While it is not always profitable to analogize 'fact' to 'fiction,' La Fontaine's fable of the crow, the cheese, and the fox demonstrates that there is a substantial difference between holding a piece of cheese in the beak and putting it in the stomach.
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All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them.
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Freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of achieving a free society.
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After all, this is the Nation's ultimate judicial tribunal, nor a super-legal-aid bureau.
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We forget that the most successful statesmen have been professionals. Lincoln was a professional politician.