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

More quotes by Felix Frankfurter

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Answers are not obtained by putting the wrong question and thereby begging the real one.
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Liberty of thought soon shrivels without freedom of expression. Nor can truth be pursued in an atmosphere hostile to the endeavor or under dangers which are hazarded only by heroes.
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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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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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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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I know of no title that I deem more honorable than that of Professor of the Harvard Law School.
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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.
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It simply is not true that war never settles anything.
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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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There is no inevitability in history except as men make it.
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Morals are three-quarters manners.
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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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It is a wise man who said that there is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals.
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No office in the land is more important than that of being a citizen.
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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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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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I don’t like a man to be too efficient. He’s likely to be not human enough.
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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.
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