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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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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
Words
Tradition
Individual
Constitution
Unrestricted
History
Meaning
Compel
Life
Leave
Intrinsic
Decision
Prior
Justice
Gather
Reading
Decisions
Free
Indeed

More quotes by Felix Frankfurter

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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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Gratitude is one of the least articulate of the emotions, especially when it is deep.
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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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Thirty resolute men in your House of Commons could save the world.
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No judge writes on a wholly clean slate.
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To be effective, judicial administration must not be leaden-footed.
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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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Old age and sickness bring out the essential characteristics of a man.
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The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes.
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Is that which was deemed to be of so fundamental a nature as to be written into the Constitution to endure for all times to be the sport of shifting winds of doctrine?
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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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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 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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There is no inevitability in history except as men make it.
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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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The dynamo of our economic system is self-interest which may range from mere petty greed to admirable types of self-expression.
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To some lawyers, all facts are created equal.
Felix Frankfurter
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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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No court can make time stand still.
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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