Quote

It has not been unknown that judges persist in error to avoid giving the appearance of weakness and vacillation.

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
Avoid
Weakness
Vacillation
Judging
Judges
Giving
Persist
Error
Unknown
Appearance
Errors

More quotes by 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
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
Appeal must be to an informed, civically militant electorate.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
Morals are three-quarters manners.
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
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
Image
In law also the emphasis makes the song.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
No office in the land is more important than that of being a citizen.
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
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
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
Freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of a free society.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
I don’t like a man to be too efficient. He’s likely to be not human enough.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
There is no inevitability in history except as men make it.
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
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
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.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
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.
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
No court can make time stand still.
Felix Frankfurter