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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.

Benjamin Cardozo

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Benjamin Cardozo
System
Society
Work
Afresh
Every
Judicial
Issue
Raised
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Decided

More quotes by Benjamin Cardozo

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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 difference is no less real because it is of degree.
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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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Consequences cannot alter statutes, but may help to fix their meaning.
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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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Opinion has a significance proportioned to the sources that sustain 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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The repetition of a catchword can hold analysis in fetters for fifty years or more.
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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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Law never is, but is always about to be.
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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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Not honesty alone, but the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive, is then the standard of behavior.
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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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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 heroic hours of life do not announce their presence by drum and trumpet.
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Method is much, technique is much, but inspiration is even more.
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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Danger invites rescue. ... The wrongdoer may not have foreseen the coming of a deliverer. He is accountable as if he had.
Benjamin Cardozo