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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

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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
Always
Finals
Never
Achievement
Democratic
Unremitting
Safe
Beckoning
Democracy
Harbor
Goal
Harbors
Values
Endeavor
Freedom
Final

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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.
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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.
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There is no inevitability in history except as men make it.
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Anybody who is any good is different from anybody else.
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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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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.
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If one man can be allowed to determine for himself what is law, every man can. That means first chaos, then tyranny. Legal process is an essential part of the democratic process.
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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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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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Thirty resolute men in your House of Commons could save the world.
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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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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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Morals are three-quarters manners.
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Freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of a free society.
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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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The ultimate touchstone of constitutionality is the Constitution itself, and not what we have said about it.
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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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I know of no title that I deem more honorable than that of Professor of the Harvard Law School.
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No court can make time stand still.
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