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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.

Benjamin Cardozo

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Benjamin Cardozo
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More quotes by Benjamin Cardozo

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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 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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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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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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Expediency may tip the scales when arguments are nicely balanced.
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The final cause of law is the welfare of society.
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Fraud includes the pretense of knowledge when knowledge there is none.
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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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The prophet and the martyr do not see the hooting throng. Their eyes are fixed on the eternities.
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Danger invites rescue. ... The wrongdoer may not have foreseen the coming of a deliverer. He is accountable as if he had.
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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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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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Justice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances.
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History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.
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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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Method is much, technique is much, but inspiration is even more.
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The repetition of a catchword can hold analysis in fetters for fifty years or more.
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