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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
Much
Latitude
Accord
Weak
Choose
Liberty
Powerful

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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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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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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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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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In america, there are two tax systems: one for the informed and one for the uninformed. Both are legal
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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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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 hand that rules the press, the radio, the screen and the far-spread magazine, rules the country.
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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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Our common law is the stock instance of a combination of custom and its successive adaptations.
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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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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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If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: thou shalt not ration justice.
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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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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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The language of the law must not be foreign to the ears of those who are to obey it.
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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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Seldom, if ever, does wisdom come, shall we punish it if it comes late?
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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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