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

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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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Answers are not obtained by putting the wrong question and thereby begging the real one.
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Anybody who is any good is different from anybody else.
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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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No court can make time stand still.
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Old age and sickness bring out the essential characteristics of a man.
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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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The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes.
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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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Ours is an accusatorial, and not an inquisitorial, system - a system in which the State must establish guilt by evidence independently and freely secured, and may not, by coercion, prove its charge against an accused out of his own mouth.
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Gratitude is one of the least articulate of the emotions, especially when it is deep.
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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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One is entitled to say without qualification that the correlation between prior judicial experience and fitness for the Supreme Court is zero.
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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 fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have been forged in controversies involving not very nice people.
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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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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 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
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Gratitude is one of the least articulate of the emotions, especially when it is deep. I can express with very limited adequacy the passionate devotion to this land that possesses millions of our people, born, like myself, under other skies, for the privilege that that this county has bestowed in allowing them to partake of its fellowship.
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It simply is not true that war never settles anything.
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