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

More quotes by Felix Frankfurter

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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.
Felix Frankfurter
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No judge writes on a wholly clean slate.
Felix Frankfurter
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Appeal must be to an informed, civically militant electorate.
Felix Frankfurter
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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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To some lawyers, all facts are created equal.
Felix Frankfurter
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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.
Felix Frankfurter
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If nowhere else, in the relation between Church and State, good fences make good neighbors.
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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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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No court can make time stand still.
Felix Frankfurter
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The Procrustean bed is not a symbol of equality. It is no less inequality to have equality among unequals.
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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The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes.
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
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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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One is entitled to say without qualification that the correlation between prior judicial experience and fitness for the Supreme Court is zero.
Felix Frankfurter
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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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Anybody who is any good is different from anybody else.
Felix Frankfurter
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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.
Felix Frankfurter
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It simply is not true that war never settles anything.
Felix Frankfurter