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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.

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
World
Present
Ancestors
Ferocious
Liberty
Emerging
Carnage
Black
Ancestor
Perilous
Others
Superstitions
Ovens
Stills
Carrying
Crawling
Still
Equipment
Amid
Steaming
Must
Charity
Atrocities
Moist
Would
Hold
Superstition
Atrocity

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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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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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There is nothing sinister in so arranging one's affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible.
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There is no surer way to misread any document than to read it literally.
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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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Our common law is the stock instance of a combination of custom and its successive adaptations.
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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 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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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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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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Every smallest step of modern industry depends upon a cooperation whose maintenance and regulation is the very stuff of law.
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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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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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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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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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The public needs the equivalent of Chevrolets as well as Cadillacs.
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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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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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