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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.

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

More quotes by Felix Frankfurter

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Answers are not obtained by putting the wrong question and thereby begging the real one.
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One who belongs to the most vilified and persecuted minority in history is not likely to be insensible to the freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution... But as judges we are neither Jew nor Gentile, neither Catholic nor agnostic.
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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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The ultimate touchstone of constitutionality is the Constitution itself, and not what we have said about it.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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It is a wise man who said that there is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals.
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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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The ultimate foundation of a free society is the binding tie of cohesive sentiment.
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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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No judge writes on a wholly clean slate.
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.
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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.
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.
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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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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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