Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Duty
Victims
Personal
Civilized
Views
Conviction
Impersonal
Law
Victim
Subordinate
Community
Private
Subordinates
Society
Rule
Pulls
Made
Exercise
Convictions
Highest
Judicial

More quotes by Felix Frankfurter

Image
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
Image
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
Image
It has not been unknown that judges persist in error to avoid giving the appearance of weakness and vacillation.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
The Procrustean bed is not a symbol of equality. It is no less inequality to have equality among unequals.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
To some lawyers, all facts are created equal.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
In law also the emphasis makes the song.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
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
Image
The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day. It does come, however slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
No judge writes on a wholly clean slate.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
No court can make time stand still.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
There is no inevitability in history except as men make it.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
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
Image
Gratitude is one of the least articulate of the emotions, especially when it is deep.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
It is a wise man who said that there is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
Freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of a free society.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
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.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
I know of no title that I deem more honorable than that of Professor of the Harvard Law School.
Felix Frankfurter
Image
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
Image
It simply is not true that war never settles anything.
Felix Frankfurter