Quote

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.

Felix Frankfurter

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Men
Law
Legal
Process
Tyranny
Means
Allowed
Part
Chaos
Firsts
Determine
First
Essential
Mean
Essentials
Every
Democratic

More quotes by Felix Frankfurter

Image
Answers are not obtained by putting the wrong question and thereby begging the real one.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
Freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of a free society.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
After all, advocates, including advocates for States, are like managers of pugilistic and election contestants in that they have a propensity for claiming everything.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
No office in the land is more important than that of being a citizen.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
The ultimate touchstone of constitutionality is the Constitution itself, and not what we have said about it.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
It is a wise man who said that there is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
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
Image
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.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
It has not been unknown that judges persist in error to avoid giving the appearance of weakness and vacillation.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
In law also the emphasis makes the song.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
There is no inevitability in history except as men make it.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
Anybody who is any good is different from anybody else.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
One is entitled to say without qualification that the correlation between prior judicial experience and fitness for the Supreme Court is zero.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
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.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
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.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
The eternal struggle in the law between constancy and change is largely a struggle between history and reason, between past reason and present needs.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
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.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
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
Image
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