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The public needs the equivalent of Chevrolets as well as Cadillacs.

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
Well
Needs
Chevrolet
Cadillacs
Equivalent
Public
Wells

More quotes by Learned Hand

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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 apathy of the modern voter is the confusion of the modern reformer.
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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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Skepticism is my only gospel, but I don't want to make a dogma out of 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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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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Every smallest step of modern industry depends upon a cooperation whose maintenance and regulation is the very stuff of law.
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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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If the prosecution of crime is to be conducted with so little regard for that protection which centuries of English law have given to the individual, we are indeed at the dawn of a new era and much that we have deemed vital to our liberties, is a delusion.
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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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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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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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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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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
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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.
Learned Hand
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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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Life in a great society, or for that matter in a small, is a web of tangled relations of all sorts, whose adjustment so that it may be endurable is an extraordinarily troublesome matter.
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In the end it is worse to suppress dissent than to run the risk of heresy.
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We recently had a referendum in New York about extending the forest preserve. The city voted for it by a large majority yet as I walk the streets I do not see afforestation written with conviction on the harried faces of my fellow citizens.
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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.
Learned Hand