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No judge writes on a wholly clean slate.

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
Judging
Clean
Writing
Slate
Wholly
Writes
Judge

More quotes by 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 ultimate foundation of a free society is the binding tie of cohesive sentiment.
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
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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 is important not to give the appearance of a predisposed mind. And it is more important not to let the mind become predisposed.
Felix Frankfurter
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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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The ultimate touchstone of constitutionality is the Constitution itself, and not what we have said about it.
Felix Frankfurter
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I don’t like a man to be too efficient. He’s likely to be not human enough.
Felix Frankfurter
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Anybody who is any good is different from anybody else.
Felix Frankfurter
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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.
Felix Frankfurter
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Appeal must be to an informed, civically militant electorate.
Felix Frankfurter
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In law also the emphasis makes the song.
Felix Frankfurter
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No office in the land is more important than that of being a citizen.
Felix Frankfurter
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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
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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.
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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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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If nowhere else, in the relation between Church and State, good fences make good neighbors.
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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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