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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.

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
Likely
Guaranteed
Catholic
Freedoms
Judging
Agnostic
Neither
Judges
Vilified
Constitution
Minority
Gentile
History
Minorities
Gentiles
Belongs
Insensible
Jew
Persecuted

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?
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
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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.
Felix Frankfurter
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The mark of a truly civilized man is confidence in the strength and security derived from the inquiring mind.
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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Answers are not obtained by putting the wrong question and thereby begging the real one.
Felix Frankfurter
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It is a wise man who said that there is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals.
Felix Frankfurter
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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.
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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Democracy is always a beckoning goal, not a safe harbor. For freedom is an unremitting endeavor, never a final achievement.
Felix Frankfurter
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Thirty resolute men in your House of Commons could save the world.
Felix Frankfurter
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Judicial judgment must take deep account...of the day before yesterday in order that yesterday may not paralyze today.
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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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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To be effective, judicial administration must not be leaden-footed.
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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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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No judge writes on a wholly clean slate.
Felix Frankfurter
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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.
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