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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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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
Make
Fence
Good
Nowhere
Neighbor
Relation
State
Church
Else
Fences
States
Neighbors

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Old age and sickness bring out the essential characteristics of a man.
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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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The mark of a truly civilized man is confidence in the strength and security derived from the inquiring mind.
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After all, advocates, including advocates for States, are like managers of pugilistic and election contestants in that they have a propensity for claiming everything.
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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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Appeal must be to an informed, civically militant electorate.
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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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The Procrustean bed is not a symbol of equality. It is no less inequality to have equality among unequals.
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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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It has not been unknown that judges persist in error to avoid giving the appearance of weakness and vacillation.
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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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To be effective, judicial administration must not be leaden-footed.
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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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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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Gratitude is one of the least articulate of the emotions, especially when it is deep.
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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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Morals are three-quarters manners.
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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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The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes.
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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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