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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.

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
Least
Fabrication
Winning
Product
Part
Finished
May
Products
Done
Concerned
Real
Whose
Made
Lose
Loses

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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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Every smallest step of modern industry depends upon a cooperation whose maintenance and regulation is the very stuff of law.
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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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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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The apathy of the modern voter is the confusion of the modern reformer.
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The spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not quite sure it is right.
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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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Our common law is the stock instance of a combination of custom and its successive adaptations.
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Words are not pebbles in alien juxtaposition.
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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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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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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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There is no surer way to misread any document than to read it literally.
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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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Since we are men, we will play the part of Man.
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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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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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Liberty is so much latitude as the powerful choose to accord to the weak.
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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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