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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
Symbol
Inequality
Symbols
Equality
Bed
Among
Less

More quotes by Felix Frankfurter

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There is no inevitability in history except as men make it.
Felix Frankfurter
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No court can make time stand still.
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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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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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Freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of a free society.
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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.
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Answers are not obtained by putting the wrong question and thereby begging the real one.
Felix Frankfurter
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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.
Felix Frankfurter
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Appeal must be to an informed, civically militant electorate.
Felix Frankfurter
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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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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
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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.
Felix Frankfurter
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The mark of a truly civilized man is confidence in the strength and security derived from the inquiring mind.
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.
Felix Frankfurter
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The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes.
Felix Frankfurter
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It has not been unknown that judges persist in error to avoid giving the appearance of weakness and vacillation.
Felix Frankfurter
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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.
Felix Frankfurter
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To be effective, judicial administration must not be leaden-footed.
Felix Frankfurter
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It is a wise man who said that there is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals.
Felix Frankfurter
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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.
Felix Frankfurter