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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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Learned Hand
Age: 89 †
Born: 1872
Born: January 27
Died: 1961
Died: August 18
Judge
Lawyer
Philosopher
Albany
New York
Billings Learned Hand
Gospel
Make
Skepticism
Dogma

More quotes by Learned Hand

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Our common law is the stock instance of a combination of custom and its successive adaptations.
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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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The condition of our survival in any but the meagerest existence is our willingness to accommodate ourselves to the conflicting interests of others, to learn to live in a social world.
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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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No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes the scripture.
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There is nothing sinister in so arranging one's affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible.
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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.
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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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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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A government of laws without men is as visionary as a government of men without laws.
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Liberty is so much latitude as the powerful choose to accord to the weak.
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The spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not quite sure it is right.
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Words are not pebbles in alien juxtaposition.
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The apathy of the modern voter is the confusion of the modern reformer.
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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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In the end it is worse to suppress dissent than to run the risk of heresy.
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There is no surer way to misread any document than to read it literally.
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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 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.
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Life is not a thing of knowing only--nay, mere knowledge has properly no place at all save as it becomes the handmaiden of feeling and emotions.
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