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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.

Benjamin Cardozo

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Benjamin Cardozo
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More quotes by Benjamin Cardozo

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The final cause of law is the welfare of society.
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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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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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Not honesty alone, but the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive, is then the standard of behavior.
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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 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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Consequences cannot alter statutes, but may help to fix their meaning.
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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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Method is much, technique is much, but inspiration is even more.
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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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We seek to find peace of mind in the word, the formula, the ritual. The hope is illusion.
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History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.
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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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Opinion has a significance proportioned to the sources that sustain it.
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The heroic hours of life do not announce their presence by drum and trumpet.
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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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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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Justice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances.
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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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