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

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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.
Learned Hand
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No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes the scripture.
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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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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Words are not pebbles in alien juxtaposition.
Learned Hand
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Liberty is so much latitude as the powerful choose to accord to the weak.
Learned Hand
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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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The spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not quite sure it is right.
Learned Hand
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The apathy of the modern voter is the confusion of the modern reformer.
Learned Hand
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No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes scripture but modern history is not a very satisfactory side-arm in political polemics it grows less and less so.
Learned Hand
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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.
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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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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Since we are men, we will play the part of Man.
Learned Hand
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Conservative political opinion in America cleaves to the tradition of the judge as passive interpreter, believing that his absolute loyalty to authoritative law is the price of his immunity from political pressure and of the security of his tenure.
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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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.
Learned Hand
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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.
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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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.
Learned Hand