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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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Learned Hand
Age: 89 †
Born: 1872
Born: January 27
Died: 1961
Died: August 18
Judge
Lawyer
Philosopher
Albany
New York
Billings Learned Hand
Justice
Adaptations
Law
Successive
Common
Adaptation
Custom
Customs
Stock
Combination
Instance

More quotes by Learned Hand

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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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There is nothing sinister in so arranging one's affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible.
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A government of laws without men is as visionary as a government of men without laws.
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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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Seldom, if ever, does wisdom come, shall we punish it if it comes late?
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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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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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Words are chameleons, which reflect the color of their environment.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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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 we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: thou shalt not ration justice.
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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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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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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.
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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 apathy of the modern voter is the confusion of the modern reformer.
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Words are not pebbles in alien juxtaposition.
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