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

More quotes by 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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No office in the land is more important than that of being a citizen.
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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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The ultimate touchstone of constitutionality is the Constitution itself, and not what we have said about it.
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Morals are three-quarters manners.
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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 Procrustean bed is not a symbol of equality. It is no less inequality to have equality among unequals.
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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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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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It has not been unknown that judges persist in error to avoid giving the appearance of weakness and vacillation.
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Democracy is always a beckoning goal, not a safe harbor. For freedom is an unremitting endeavor, never a final achievement.
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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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The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes.
Felix Frankfurter
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There is no inevitability in history except as men make it.
Felix Frankfurter
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No court can make time stand still.
Felix Frankfurter
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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.
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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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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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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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