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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.

Benjamin Cardozo

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Benjamin Cardozo
Natural
Assumption
Running
Throughout
Right
Evolution
Constant
Limits
Habit
Evolutions
Law
Spontaneous
Wrong
Runs

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The difference is no less real because it is of degree.
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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 validity of a tax depends upon its nature, and not upon its name.
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Law never is, but is always about to be.
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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 repetition of a catchword can hold analysis in fetters for fifty years or more.
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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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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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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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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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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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The prophet and the martyr do not see the hooting throng. Their eyes are fixed on the eternities.
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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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Consequences cannot alter statutes, but may help to fix their meaning.
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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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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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Method is much, technique is much, but inspiration is even more.
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Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.
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Fraud includes the pretense of knowledge when knowledge there is none.
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