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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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Learned Hand
Age: 89 †
Born: 1872
Born: January 27
Died: 1961
Died: August 18
Judge
Lawyer
Philosopher
Albany
New York
Billings Learned Hand
Opinion
Absolute
Authoritative
Law
Judge
Immunity
Price
Tenure
Political
Conservative
Interpreter
America
Tradition
Passive
Believe
Judging
Believing
Pressure
Loyalty
Security
Absolutes
Cleaves

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No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes the scripture.
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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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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.
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Those of us who have come to years of discretion and more, must often take to retrospect, and seek to appraise the outcome of our lives.
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Liberty is so much latitude as the powerful choose to accord to the weak.
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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 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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Words are not pebbles in alien juxtaposition.
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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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Since we are men, we will play the part of Man.
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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.
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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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There is nothing sinister in so arranging one's affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible.
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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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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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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.
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