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We accept the verdict of the past until the need for change cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of inertia and the irksomeness of action.
Learned Hand
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Learned Hand
Age: 89 †
Born: 1872
Born: January 27
Died: 1961
Died: August 18
Judge
Lawyer
Philosopher
Albany
New York
Billings Learned Hand
Needs
Choices
Comforts
Upon
Inertia
Force
Cries
Action
Cry
Past
Accept
Change
Comfort
Need
Choice
Loudly
Enough
Accepting
Verdict
More quotes by Learned Hand
Life is not a thing of knowing only--nay, mere knowledge has properly no place at all save as it becomes the handmaiden of feeling and emotions.
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We all have our prayer-wheels which we set up on the steppes. The indifferent winds come and carry most of them away to gasp out their little lives in the desert, for few reach heaven.
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Right knows no boundaries, and justice no frontiers the brotherhood of man is not a domestic institution.
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Our common law is the stock instance of a combination of custom and its successive adaptations.
Learned Hand
There is no surer way to misread any document than to read it literally.
Learned Hand
You cannot raise the standard against oppression, or leap into the breach to relieve injustice, and still keep an open mind to every disconcerting fact, or an open ear to the cold voice of doubt.
Learned Hand
We may win when we lose, if we have done what we can for by so doing we have made real at least some part of that finished product in whose fabrication we are most concerned: ourselves.
Learned Hand
The condition of our survival in any but the meagerest existence is our willingness to accommodate ourselves to the conflicting interests of others, to learn to live in a social world.
Learned Hand
Those of us who have come to years of discretion and more, must often take to retrospect, and seek to appraise the outcome of our lives.
Learned Hand
Would we hold liberty, we must have charity- charity to others, charity to ourselves, crawling up from the moist ovens of a steaming world, still carrying the passional equipment of our ferocious ancestors, emerging from black superstition amid carnage and atrocity to our perilous present.
Learned Hand
The hand that rules the press, the radio, the screen and the far-spread magazine, rules the country.
Learned Hand
If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: thou shalt not ration justice.
Learned Hand
The language of the law must not be foreign to the ears of those who are to obey it.
Learned Hand
No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes scripture but modern history is not a very satisfactory side-arm in political polemics it grows less and less so.
Learned Hand
The mid-day sun is too much for most eyes one is dazzled even with its reflection. Be careful that too broad and high an aim does not paralyze your effort and clog your springs of action.
Learned Hand
Liberty is so much latitude as the powerful choose to accord to the weak.
Learned Hand
No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes the scripture.
Learned Hand
Seldom, if ever, does wisdom come, shall we punish it if it comes late?
Learned Hand
The public needs the equivalent of Chevrolets as well as Cadillacs.
Learned Hand
It is of course true that any kind of judicial legislation is objectionable on the score of the limited interests which a Court can represent, yet there are wrongs which in fact legislatures cannot be brought to take an interest in, at least not until the Courts have acted.
Learned Hand