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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
Action
Cry
Past
Accept
Change
Comfort
Need
Choice
Loudly
Enough
Accepting
Verdict
Needs
Choices
Comforts
Upon
Inertia
Force
Cries

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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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Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.
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No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes the scripture.
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Conservative political opinion in America cleaves to the tradition of the judge as passive interpreter, believing that his absolute loyalty to authoritative law is the price of his immunity from political pressure and of the security of his tenure.
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Reputation, like a face, is the symbol of its possessor and creator, and another can use it only as a mask.
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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.
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It is the daily it is the small it is the cumulative injuries of little people that we are here to protect....If we are able to keep our democracy, there must be once commandment: THOU SHALT NOT RATION JUSTICE.
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The apathy of the modern voter is the confusion of the modern reformer.
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Since we are men, we will play the part of Man.
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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.
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Skepticism is my only gospel, but I don't want to make a dogma out of it.
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Our common law is the stock instance of a combination of custom and its successive adaptations.
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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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The spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not quite sure it is right.
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In the end it is worse to suppress dissent than to run the risk of heresy.
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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.
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The public needs the equivalent of Chevrolets as well as Cadillacs.
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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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The hand that rules the press, the radio, the screen and the far-spread magazine, rules the country.
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