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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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More quotes by Benjamin Cardozo

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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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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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Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.
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Expediency may tip the scales when arguments are nicely balanced.
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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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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 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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History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.
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Justice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances.
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Opinion has a significance proportioned to the sources that sustain it.
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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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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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With traps and obstacles and hazards confronting us on every hand, only blindness or indifference will fail to turn in all humility, for guidance or for warning, to the study of examples.
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Justice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances. Substitute statute for decision, and you shift the center of authority, but add no quota of inspired wisdom.
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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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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 repetition of a catchword can hold analysis in fetters for fifty years or more.
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The validity of a tax depends upon its nature, and not upon its name.
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Method is much, technique is much, but inspiration is even more.
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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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