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Words are chameleons, which reflect the color of their environment.

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
Environment
Words
Chameleon
Reflect
Reflection
Color

More quotes by Learned Hand

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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.
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.
Learned Hand
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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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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.
Learned Hand
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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.
Learned Hand
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Right knows no boundaries, and justice no frontiers the brotherhood of man is not a domestic institution.
Learned Hand
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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.
Learned Hand
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No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes the scripture.
Learned Hand
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Bipartisan democracy presupposes the individual, whose welfare is identical with that of the community in which he lives, the absence of coherent social classes, a basic uniformity of interest throughout.
Learned Hand
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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.
Learned Hand
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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.
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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There is nothing sinister in so arranging one's affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible.
Learned Hand
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The profession of the law of which he [a judge] is a part is charged with the articulation and final incidence of the successive efforts towards justice it must feel the circulation of the communal blood or it will wither and drop off, a useless member.
Learned Hand
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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.
Learned Hand
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Words are not pebbles in alien juxtaposition.
Learned Hand
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A government of laws without men is as visionary as a government of men without laws.
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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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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In america, there are two tax systems: one for the informed and one for the uninformed. Both are legal
Learned Hand