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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.

Learned Hand

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Learned Hand
Age: 89 †
Born: 1872
Born: January 27
Died: 1961
Died: August 18
Judge
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Philosopher
Albany
New York
Billings Learned Hand
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More quotes by Learned Hand

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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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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.
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Justice is the tolerable accommodation of the conflicting interests of society, and I don't believe there is any royal road to attain such accommodation concretely.
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Words are not pebbles in alien juxtaposition.
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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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The condition of our survival in any but the meagerest existence is our willingness to accommodate ourselves to the conflicting interests of others, to learn to live in a social world.
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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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The mutual confidence on which all else depends can be maintained only by an open mind and a brave reliance upon free discussion.
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There is no surer way to misread any document than to read it literally.
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A government of laws without men is as visionary as a government of men without laws.
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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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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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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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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.
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Right knows no boundaries, and justice no frontiers the brotherhood of man is not a domestic institution.
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Seldom, if ever, does wisdom come, shall we punish it if it comes late?
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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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If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: thou shalt not ration justice.
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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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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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