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Consequences cannot alter statutes, but may help to fix their meaning.

Benjamin Cardozo

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Benjamin Cardozo
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The great ideals of liberty and equality are preserved against the assaults of opportunism, the expediency of the passing hour, the erosion of small encroachments, the scorn and derision of those who have no patience with general principles.
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The prophet and the martyr do not see the hooting throng. Their eyes are fixed on the eternities.
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What has once been settled by a precedent will not be unsettled overnight, for certainty and uniformity are gains not lightly sacrificed. Above all is this true when honest men have shaped their conduct on the faith of the pronouncement.
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Law never is, but is always about to be.
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Opinion has a significance proportioned to the sources that sustain it.
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Every human being of adult years and sound mind has a legal right to determine what shall be done with his own body.
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History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.
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Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.
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The heroic hours of life do not announce their presence by drum and trumpet.
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The difference is no less real because it is of degree.
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Not honesty alone, but the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive, is then the standard of behavior.
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The constant assumption runs throughout the law that the natural and spontaneous evolutions of habit fix the limits of right and wrong.
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No judicial system could do society's work if each issue had to be decided afresh in every case which raised it.
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The judge is not the knight-errant, roaming at will in pursuit of his own ideal of beauty or of goodness.
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The repetition of a catchword can hold analysis in fetters for fifty years or more.
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We seek to find peace of mind in the word, the formula, the ritual. The hope is illusion.
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Justice, though due to the accused, is due the accuser also. The concept of fairness cannot be strained till it is narrowed to a filament. We are to keep our balance true.
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In the end the great truth will have been learned that the quest is greater than what is sought, the effort finer that the prize (or rather, that the effort is the prize), the victory cheap and hollow were it not for the rigor of the game.
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The great tides and currents which engulf the rest of men do not turn aside in their course and pass the judges by.
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The validity of a tax depends upon its nature, and not upon its name.
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