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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
Words
Chameleon
Reflect
Reflection
Color
Environment

More quotes by 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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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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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.
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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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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Our common law is the stock instance of a combination of custom and its successive adaptations.
Learned Hand
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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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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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The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understands the minds of other men and women.
Learned Hand
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The public needs the equivalent of Chevrolets as well as Cadillacs.
Learned Hand
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Since we are men, we will play the part of Man.
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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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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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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In the end it is worse to suppress dissent than to run the risk of heresy.
Learned Hand
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The hand that rules the press, the radio, the screen and the far-spread magazine, rules the country.
Learned Hand
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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.
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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Seldom, if ever, does wisdom come, shall we punish it if it comes late?
Learned Hand