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

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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.
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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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The ultimate touchstone of constitutionality is the Constitution itself, and not what we have said about it.
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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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If nowhere else, in the relation between Church and State, good fences make good neighbors.
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The ultimate foundation of a free society is the binding tie of cohesive sentiment.
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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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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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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.
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It is a wise man who said that there is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals.
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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.
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No office in the land is more important than that of being a citizen.
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No court can make time stand still.
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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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Anybody who is any good is different from anybody else.
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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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Freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of a free society.
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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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In law also the emphasis makes the song.
Felix Frankfurter