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Liberty is so much latitude as the powerful choose to accord to the weak.

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
Latitude
Accord
Weak
Choose
Liberty
Powerful
Much

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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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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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Every smallest step of modern industry depends upon a cooperation whose maintenance and regulation is the very stuff of law.
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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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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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The public needs the equivalent of Chevrolets as well as Cadillacs.
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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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In the end it is worse to suppress dissent than to run the risk of heresy.
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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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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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Bipartisan democracy presupposes the individual, whose welfare is identical with that of the community in which he lives, the absence of coherent social classes, a basic uniformity of interest throughout.
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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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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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The apathy of the modern voter is the confusion of the modern reformer.
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It is the daily it is the small it is the cumulative injuries of little people that we are here to protect....If we are able to keep our democracy, there must be once commandment: THOU SHALT NOT RATION JUSTICE.
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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.
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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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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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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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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.
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