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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

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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
Needs
Eternal
Present
Struggle
Law
History
Past
Change
Constancy
Reason
Largely

More quotes by Felix Frankfurter

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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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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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There is no inevitability in history except as men make it.
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Morals are three-quarters manners.
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No court can make time stand still.
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Thirty resolute men in your House of Commons could save the world.
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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.
Felix Frankfurter
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It simply is not true that war never settles anything.
Felix Frankfurter
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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.
Felix Frankfurter
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Anybody who is any good is different from anybody else.
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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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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.
Felix Frankfurter
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Gratitude is one of the least articulate of the emotions, especially when it is deep.
Felix Frankfurter
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To be effective, judicial administration must not be leaden-footed.
Felix Frankfurter
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I know of no title that I deem more honorable than that of Professor of the Harvard Law School.
Felix Frankfurter
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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?
Felix Frankfurter
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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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The dynamo of our economic system is self-interest which may range from mere petty greed to admirable types of self-expression.
Felix Frankfurter
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To some lawyers, all facts are created equal.
Felix Frankfurter
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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.
Felix Frankfurter