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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 public needs the equivalent of Chevrolets as well as Cadillacs.
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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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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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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There is no surer way to misread any document than to read it literally.
Learned Hand
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Liberty is so much latitude as the powerful choose to accord to the weak.
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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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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Our common law is the stock instance of a combination of custom and its successive adaptations.
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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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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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 hand that rules the press, the radio, the screen and the far-spread magazine, rules the country.
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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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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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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Words are not pebbles in alien juxtaposition.
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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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 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