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The Procrustean bed is not a symbol of equality. It is no less inequality to have equality among unequals.

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
Inequality
Symbols
Equality
Bed
Among
Less
Symbol

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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To some lawyers, all facts are created equal.
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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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It is a wise man who said that there is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals.
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No office in the land is more important than that of being a citizen.
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There is no inevitability in history except as men make it.
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The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes.
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In law also the emphasis makes the song.
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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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Appeal must be to an informed, civically militant electorate.
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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 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.
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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.
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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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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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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 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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Democracy is always a beckoning goal, not a safe harbor. For freedom is an unremitting endeavor, never a final achievement.
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We recognize that stare decisis embodies an important social policy that represents an element of continuity in law and is rooted in the psychological need to satisfy reasonable expectations.
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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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