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Fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalised medium of reason, that's all we have between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feelings.

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
Mediums
Cruelty
Limited
Tyranny
Mere
Unbridled
Law
Undisciplined
Feelings
Fragile
Reason
Medium

More quotes by Felix Frankfurter

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A court which yields to the popular will thereby licenses itself to practice despotism, for there can be no assurance that it will not, on another occasion, indulge its own will.
Felix Frankfurter
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No judge writes on a wholly clean slate.
Felix Frankfurter
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To some lawyers, all facts are created equal.
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Freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of a free society.
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Anybody who is any good is different from anybody else.
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Old age and sickness bring out the essential characteristics of a man.
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Thirty resolute men in your House of Commons could save the world.
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No court can make time stand still.
Felix Frankfurter
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The mark of a truly civilized man is confidence in the strength and security derived from the inquiring mind.
Felix Frankfurter
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It simply is not true that war never settles anything.
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Answers are not obtained by putting the wrong question and thereby begging the real one.
Felix Frankfurter
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Morals are three-quarters manners.
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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.
Felix Frankfurter
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If nowhere else, in the relation between Church and State, good fences make good neighbors.
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The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes.
Felix Frankfurter
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Appeal must be to an informed, civically militant electorate.
Felix Frankfurter
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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.
Felix Frankfurter
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It would be a stultification of the responsibility which the course of constitutional history has cast upon this Court to hold that in order to convict a man the police cannot extract by force what is in his mind, but can extract what is in his stomach.
Felix Frankfurter
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The ultimate touchstone of constitutionality is the Constitution itself, and not what we have said about it.
Felix Frankfurter
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Future lawyers should be more aware that law is not a system of abstract logic, but the web of arrangements, rooted in history but also in hopes, for promoting to a maximum the full use of a nation's resources and talents.
Felix Frankfurter