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If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: thou shalt not ration justice.

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
Must
Commandment
Shalt
Commandments
Thou
Democracy
Justice
Keep
Ration
Political
Rations

More quotes by Learned Hand

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Justice is the tolerable accommodation of the conflicting interests of society, and I don't believe there is any royal road to attain such accommodation concretely.
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It is still in the lap of the gods whether a society can succeed which is based on civil liberties and human rights conceived as I have tried to describe them but of one thing at least we may be sure: the alternatives that have so far appeared have been immeasurably worse.
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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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Seldom, if ever, does wisdom come, shall we punish it if it comes late?
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The mutual confidence on which all else depends can be maintained only by an open mind and a brave reliance upon free discussion.
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Words are chameleons, which reflect the color of their environment.
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The public needs the equivalent of Chevrolets as well as Cadillacs.
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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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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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A government of laws without men is as visionary as a government of men without laws.
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