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

More quotes by Felix Frankfurter

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It would be a narrow conception of jurisprudence to confine the notion of laws to what is found written on the statute books, and to disregard the gloss which life has written upon it.
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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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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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The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day. It does come, however slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority.
Felix Frankfurter
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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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To be effective, judicial administration must not be leaden-footed.
Felix Frankfurter
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The dynamo of our economic system is self-interest which may range from mere petty greed to admirable types of self-expression.
Felix Frankfurter
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Morals are three-quarters manners.
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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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No office in the land is more important than that of being a citizen.
Felix Frankfurter
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There is no inevitability in history except as men make it.
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The mark of a truly civilized man is confidence in the strength and security derived from the inquiring mind.
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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 words of the Constitution... are so unrestricted by their intrinsic meaning or by their history or by tradition or by prior decisions that they leave the individual Justice free, if indeed they do not compel him, to gather meaning not from reading the Constitution but from reading life.
Felix Frankfurter
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To some lawyers, all facts are created equal.
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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The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes.
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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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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Democracy is always a beckoning goal, not a safe harbor. For freedom is an unremitting endeavor, never a final achievement.
Felix Frankfurter