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Seldom, if ever, does wisdom come, shall we punish it if it comes late?

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
Doe
Ever
Come
Punish
Seldom
Late
Shall
Wisdom
Comes

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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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Our common law is the stock instance of a combination of custom and its successive adaptations.
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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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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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A government of laws without men is as visionary as a government of men without laws.
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Words are chameleons, which reflect the color of their environment.
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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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If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one 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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Words are not pebbles in alien juxtaposition.
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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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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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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.
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