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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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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 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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Fraud includes the pretense of knowledge when knowledge there is none.
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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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Expediency may tip the scales when arguments are nicely balanced.
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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 repetition of a catchword can hold analysis in fetters for fifty years or more.
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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 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 final cause of law is the welfare of society.
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Opinion has a significance proportioned to the sources that sustain it.
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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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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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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 validity of a tax depends upon its nature, and not upon its name.
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The heroic hours of life do not announce their presence by drum and trumpet.
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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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Justice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances.
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Consequences cannot alter statutes, but may help to fix their meaning.
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