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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Decisions of this Court do not have intrinsic authority.
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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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Old age and sickness bring out the essential characteristics of a man.
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Litigation is the pursuit of practical ends, not a game of chess.
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Answers are not obtained by putting the wrong question and thereby begging the real one.
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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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The mark of a truly civilized man is confidence in the strength and security derived from the inquiring mind.
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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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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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The ultimate touchstone of constitutionality is the Constitution itself and not what we have said about it.
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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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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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To some lawyers, all facts are created equal.
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It simply is not true that war never settles anything.
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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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Anybody can decide a question if only a single principle is in controversy.
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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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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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Of compelling consideration is the fact that words acquire scope and function from the history of events which they summarize.
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We forget that the most successful statesmen have been professionals. Lincoln was a professional politician.
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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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The course of decision in this Court has thus far jealously enforced the principle of a free society secured by the prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures. Its safeguards are not to be worn away by a process of devitalizing interpretation.