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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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Learned Hand
Age: 89 †
Born: 1872
Born: January 27
Died: 1961
Died: August 18
Judge
Lawyer
Philosopher
Albany
New York
Billings Learned Hand
Ends
Suppress
Heresy
Dissent
Orthodox
Worse
Risk
Running

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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.
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We recently had a referendum in New York about extending the forest preserve. The city voted for it by a large majority yet as I walk the streets I do not see afforestation written with conviction on the harried faces of my fellow citizens.
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The mid-day sun is too much for most eyes one is dazzled even with its reflection. Be careful that too broad and high an aim does not paralyze your effort and clog your springs of action.
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Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.
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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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In america, there are two tax systems: one for the informed and one for the uninformed. Both are legal
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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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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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Words are not pebbles in alien juxtaposition.
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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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A government of laws without men is as visionary as a government of men without laws.
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The public needs the equivalent of Chevrolets as well as Cadillacs.
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Liberty is so much latitude as the powerful choose to accord to the weak.
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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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Our common law is the stock instance of a combination of custom and its successive adaptations.
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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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Skepticism is my only gospel, but I don't want to make a dogma out of it.
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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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The language of the law must not be foreign to the ears of those who are to obey it.
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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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