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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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After all, advocates, including advocates for States, are like managers of pugilistic and election contestants in that they have a propensity for claiming everything.
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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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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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Judicial judgment must take deep account...of the day before yesterday in order that yesterday may not paralyze today.
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There is torture of mind as well as body the will is as much affected by fear as by force. And there comes a point where this Court should not be ignorant as judges of what we know as men.
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It simply is not true that war never settles anything.
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The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes.
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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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No office in the land is more important than that of being a citizen.
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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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Answers are not obtained by putting the wrong question and thereby begging the real one.
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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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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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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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There is no inevitability in history except as men make it.
Felix Frankfurter
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I don’t like a man to be too efficient. He’s likely to be not human enough.
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Liberty of thought soon shrivels without freedom of expression. Nor can truth be pursued in an atmosphere hostile to the endeavor or under dangers which are hazarded only by heroes.
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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We recognize that stare decisis embodies an important social policy that represents an element of continuity in law and is rooted in the psychological need to satisfy reasonable expectations.
Felix Frankfurter