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Judicial judgment must take deep account...of the day before yesterday in order that yesterday may not paralyze today.

Felix Frankfurter

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Felix Frankfurter
Age: 82 †
Born: 1882
Born: November 15
Died: 1965
Died: February 22
Former Associate Justice Of The Supreme Court Of The United States
Judge
Lawyer
Politician
Vienna
Austria
Order
Paralyze
Today
Precedent
Judicial
May
Account
Take
Accounts
Must
Yesterday
Judgment
Deep

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Answers are not obtained by putting the wrong question and thereby begging the real one.
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It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have been forged in controversies involving not very nice people.
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Gratitude is one of the least articulate of the emotions, especially when it is deep. I can express with very limited adequacy the passionate devotion to this land that possesses millions of our people, born, like myself, under other skies, for the privilege that that this county has bestowed in allowing them to partake of its fellowship.
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Government is itself an art, one of the subtlest of the arts. It is neither business, nor technology, nor applied science. It is the art of making men live together in peace and with reasonable happiness.
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Gratitude is one of the least articulate of the emotions, especially when it is deep.
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I know of no title that I deem more honorable than that of Professor of the Harvard Law School.
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If one man can be allowed to determine for himself what is law, every man can. That means first chaos, then tyranny. Legal process is an essential part of the democratic process.
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The ultimate touchstone of constitutionality is the Constitution itself, and not what we have said about it.
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Appeal must be to an informed, civically militant electorate.
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No court can make time stand still.
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Ours is an accusatorial, and not an inquisitorial, system - a system in which the State must establish guilt by evidence independently and freely secured, and may not, by coercion, prove its charge against an accused out of his own mouth.
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The eternal struggle in the law between constancy and change is largely a struggle between history and reason, between past reason and present needs.
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It is important not to give the appearance of a predisposed mind. And it is more important not to let the mind become predisposed.
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The Procrustean bed is not a symbol of equality. It is no less inequality to have equality among unequals.
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In the first place, lawyers better remember they are human beings, and a human being who hasn't his periods of doubts and distresses and disappointments must be a cabbage, not a human being. That is number one.
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It has not been unknown that judges persist in error to avoid giving the appearance of weakness and vacillation.
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For the highest exercise of judicial duty is to subordinate one's personal pulls and one's private views to the law of which we are all guaradians - those impersonal convictions that made a society a civilized community, and not the victims of personal rule.
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While it is not always profitable to analogize fact to fiction, La Fontaine's fable of the crow, the cheese, and the fox demonstrates that there is a substantial difference between holding a piece of cheese in the beak and putting it in the stomach.
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Old age and sickness bring out the essential characteristics of a man.
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There is no inevitability in history except as men make it.
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