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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
Heresy
Dissent
Orthodox
Worse
Risk
Running
Ends
Suppress

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As soon as we cease to pry about at random, we shall come to rely upon accredited bodies of authoritative dogma and as soon as we come to rely upon accredited bodies of authoritative dogma, not only are the days of our liberty over, but we have lost the password that has hitherto opened to us the gates of success as well.
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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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The spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not quite sure it is right.
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If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: thou shalt not ration justice.
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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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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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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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Every smallest step of modern industry depends upon a cooperation whose maintenance and regulation is the very stuff of law.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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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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.
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