Quote

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

Learned Hand

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Learned Hand
Age: 89 †
Born: 1872
Born: January 27
Died: 1961
Died: August 18
Judge
Lawyer
Philosopher
Albany
New York
Billings Learned Hand
Much
Latitude
Accord
Weak
Choose
Liberty
Powerful

More quotes by Learned Hand

Image
The apathy of the modern voter is the confusion of the modern reformer.
Learned Hand
Image
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.
Learned Hand
Image
Since we are men, we will play the part of Man.
Learned Hand
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Learned Hand
Image
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.
Learned Hand
Image
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
Image
The public needs the equivalent of Chevrolets as well as Cadillacs.
Learned Hand
Image
We all have our prayer-wheels which we set up on the steppes. The indifferent winds come and carry most of them away to gasp out their little lives in the desert, for few reach heaven.
Learned Hand
Image
Right knows no boundaries, and justice no frontiers the brotherhood of man is not a domestic institution.
Learned Hand
Image
A government of laws without men is as visionary as a government of men without laws.
Learned Hand
Image
Our common law is the stock instance of a combination of custom and its successive adaptations.
Learned Hand
Image
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.
Learned Hand
Image
Every smallest step of modern industry depends upon a cooperation whose maintenance and regulation is the very stuff of law.
Learned Hand
Image
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
Image
No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes the scripture.
Learned Hand
Image
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
Image
The spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not quite sure it is right.
Learned Hand
Image
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.
Learned Hand