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There is no surer way to misread any document than to read it literally.

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
Inspirational
Way
Misread
Surer
Document
Documents
Literally
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More quotes by Learned Hand

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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.
Learned Hand
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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.
Learned Hand
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Our common law is the stock instance of a combination of custom and its successive adaptations.
Learned Hand
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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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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.
Learned Hand
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Words are not pebbles in alien juxtaposition.
Learned Hand
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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.
Learned Hand
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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.
Learned Hand
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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.
Learned Hand
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The lawyer must either learn to live more capaciously or be content to find himself continuously less trusted, more circumscribed, till he becomes hardly more important than a minor administrator, confined to a monotonous round of record and routine, without dignity, inspiration, or respect.
Learned Hand
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There is nothing sinister in so arranging one's affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible.
Learned Hand
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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.
Learned Hand
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Since we are men, we will play the part of Man.
Learned Hand
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The public needs the equivalent of Chevrolets as well as Cadillacs.
Learned Hand
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The language of the law must not be foreign to the ears of those who are to obey it.
Learned Hand
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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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Every smallest step of modern industry depends upon a cooperation whose maintenance and regulation is the very stuff of law.
Learned Hand
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We all have our prayer-wheels which we set up on the steppes. The indifferent winds come and carry most of them away to gasp out their little lives in the desert, for few reach heaven.
Learned Hand
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The spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not quite sure it is right.
Learned Hand
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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.
Learned Hand