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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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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
Occasion
Yield
Licenses
Occasions
Yields
Popular
Despotism
Court
Thereby
Justice
Indulge
Practice
License
Another
Assurance

More quotes by 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.
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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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It has not been unknown that judges persist in error to avoid giving the appearance of weakness and vacillation.
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To be effective, judicial administration must not be leaden-footed.
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Anybody who is any good is different from anybody else.
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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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Morals are three-quarters manners.
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The ultimate foundation of a free society is the binding tie of cohesive sentiment.
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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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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
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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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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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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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In law also the emphasis makes the song.
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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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Judicial judgment must take deep account...of the day before yesterday in order that yesterday may not paralyze today.
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Appeal must be to an informed, civically militant electorate.
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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Answers are not obtained by putting the wrong question and thereby begging the real one.
Felix Frankfurter
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To some lawyers, all facts are created equal.
Felix Frankfurter