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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.

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
Heart
Lying
Save
Much
Help
Hearts
Men
Freedom
Court
Love
Hate
Constitution
Helping
Lies
Women
Liberty
Government
Law
Even
Dies
Libertarian

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A government of laws without men is as visionary as a government of men without laws.
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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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A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few.
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Seldom, if ever, does wisdom come, shall we punish it if it comes late?
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Liberty is so much latitude as the powerful choose to accord to the weak.
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We recently had a referendum in New York about extending the forest preserve. The city voted for it by a large majority yet as I walk the streets I do not see afforestation written with conviction on the harried faces of my fellow citizens.
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It was not the violence of our enemies [in World War I] that would undo us, I thought, but our own spiritual weakness, the shallowness of our convictions.
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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.
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Our common law is the stock instance of a combination of custom and its successive adaptations.
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The lawyer must either learn to live more capaciously or be content to find himself continuously less trusted, more circumscribed, till he becomes hardly more important than a minor administrator, confined to a monotonous round of record and routine, without dignity, inspiration, or respect.
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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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Right knows no boundaries, and justice no frontiers the brotherhood of man is not a domestic institution.
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For, when all is said, as my friend George Rublee likes to put it, the only success is to be a success as a person and it is still not too late for that.
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Life is made up of a series of judgments on insufficient data, and if we waited to run down all our doubts, it would flow past us.
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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.
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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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The public needs the equivalent of Chevrolets as well as Cadillacs.
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The language of the law must not be foreign to the ears of those who are to obey it.
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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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Words are not pebbles in alien juxtaposition.
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