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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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Learned Hand
Age: 89 †
Born: 1872
Born: January 27
Died: 1961
Died: August 18
Judge
Lawyer
Philosopher
Albany
New York
Billings Learned Hand
Stills
Cold
Leap
Still
Doubt
Oppression
Every
Open
Standard
Mind
Fact
Raise
Voice
Injustice
Facts
Raises
Disconcerting
Keep
Ears
Relieve
Cannot
Standards
Breach

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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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Since we are men, we will play the part of Man.
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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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In the end it is worse to suppress dissent than to run the risk of heresy.
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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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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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Our common law is the stock instance of a combination of custom and its successive adaptations.
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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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Words are chameleons, which reflect the color of their environment.
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The public needs the equivalent of Chevrolets as well as Cadillacs.
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The hand that rules the press, the radio, the screen and the far-spread magazine, rules the country.
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Life is made up of a series of judgments on insufficient data, and if we waited to run down all our doubts, it would flow past us.
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