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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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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
Giving
Persist
Error
Unknown
Appearance
Errors
Avoid
Weakness
Vacillation
Judging
Judges

More quotes by 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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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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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.
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The Procrustean bed is not a symbol of equality. It is no less inequality to have equality among unequals.
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The ultimate foundation of a free society is the binding tie of cohesive sentiment.
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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.
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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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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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Answers are not obtained by putting the wrong question and thereby begging the real one.
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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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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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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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No office in the land is more important than that of being a citizen.
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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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Future lawyers should be more aware that law is not a system of abstract logic, but the web of arrangements, rooted in history but also in hopes, for promoting to a maximum the full use of a nation's resources and talents.
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The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes.
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To be effective, judicial administration must not be leaden-footed.
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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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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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The ultimate touchstone of constitutionality is the Constitution itself, and not what we have said about it.
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