Quote

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

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
Force
Stomach
History
Cast
Order
Police
Cannot
Court
Mind
Hold
Convict
Would
Course
Convicts
Men
Responsibility
Extract
Upon
Constitutional

More quotes by Felix Frankfurter

Image
No office in the land is more important than that of being a citizen.
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
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?
Felix Frankfurter
Image
There is no inevitability in history except as men make it.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
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
Image
In law also the emphasis makes the song.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
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
Image
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.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
I know of no title that I deem more honorable than that of Professor of the Harvard Law School.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
It simply is not true that war never settles anything.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
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
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
Gratitude is one of the least articulate of the emotions, especially when it is deep.
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
It has not been unknown that judges persist in error to avoid giving the appearance of weakness and vacillation.
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
Judicial judgment must take deep account...of the day before yesterday in order that yesterday may not paralyze today.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
Appeal must be to an informed, civically militant electorate.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
Anybody who is any good is different from anybody else.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
The dynamo of our economic system is self-interest which may range from mere petty greed to admirable types of self-expression.
Felix Frankfurter