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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.

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
Time
Recorded
Exiled
Proved
Maimed
Hated
Smother
Generally
Declined
Beginning
Heretics
Impossible
Heretic
Society
Tortured
Butchered
Always
Succeeded
Ostracized

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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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The spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not quite sure it is right.
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A government of laws without men is as visionary as a government of men without laws.
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Words are not pebbles in alien juxtaposition.
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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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Words are chameleons, which reflect the color of their environment.
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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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Our common law is the stock instance of a combination of custom and its successive adaptations.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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.
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The public needs the equivalent of Chevrolets as well as Cadillacs.
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Every smallest step of modern industry depends upon a cooperation whose maintenance and regulation is the very stuff of law.
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There is no surer way to misread any document than to read it literally.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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