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The spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not quite sure it is right.

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
Freedom
Spirit
Right
Liberty
Quite
Sure

More quotes by Learned Hand

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As soon as we cease to pry about at random, we shall come to rely upon accredited bodies of authoritative dogma and as soon as we come to rely upon accredited bodies of authoritative dogma, not only are the days of our liberty over, but we have lost the password that has hitherto opened to us the gates of success as well.
Learned Hand
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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 is so much latitude as the powerful choose to accord to the weak.
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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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Skepticism is my only gospel, but I don't want to make a dogma out of it.
Learned Hand
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Heretics have been hated from the beginning of recorded time they have been ostracized, exiled, tortured, maimed, and butchered but it has generally proved impossible to smother them and when it has not, the society that has succeeded has always declined.
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The fathers who contrived and passed the Consititution were wise in their generation as time passes, we come more and more to realize their powers of divination.
Learned Hand
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The apathy of the modern voter is the confusion of the modern reformer.
Learned Hand
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Words are chameleons, which reflect the color of their environment.
Learned Hand
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If the prosecution of crime is to be conducted with so little regard for that protection which centuries of English law have given to the individual, we are indeed at the dawn of a new era and much that we have deemed vital to our liberties, is a delusion.
Learned Hand
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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
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Life in a great society, or for that matter in a small, is a web of tangled relations of all sorts, whose adjustment so that it may be endurable is an extraordinarily troublesome matter.
Learned Hand
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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.
Learned Hand
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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
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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.
Learned Hand
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The language of the law must not be foreign to the ears of those who are to obey it.
Learned Hand
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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.
Learned Hand
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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.
Learned Hand
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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
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Words are not pebbles in alien juxtaposition.
Learned Hand