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To be effective, judicial administration must not be leaden-footed.

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
Judicial
Effective
Administration
Must
Leaden
Footed

More quotes by 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?
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There is no inevitability in history except as men make it.
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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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I don’t like a man to be too efficient. He’s likely to be not human enough.
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The mark of a truly civilized man is confidence in the strength and security derived from the inquiring mind.
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No court can make time stand still.
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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.
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In law also the emphasis makes the song.
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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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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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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.
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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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If nowhere else, in the relation between Church and State, good fences make good neighbors.
Felix Frankfurter
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It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have been forged in controversies involving not very nice people.
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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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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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No judge writes on a wholly clean slate.
Felix Frankfurter
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Freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of a free society.
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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The Procrustean bed is not a symbol of equality. It is no less inequality to have equality among unequals.
Felix Frankfurter