Benjamin Cardozo Quotes

25 quotes in 385 categories

• Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.
• What has once been settled by a precedent will not be unsettled overnight, for certainty and uniformity are gains not lightly sacrificed. Above all is…
• The prophet and the martyr do not see the hooting throng. Their eyes are fixed on the eternities.
• The great ideals of liberty and equality are preserved against the assaults of opportunism, the expediency of the passing hour, the erosion of small encroachments,…
• The Constitution was framed upon the theory that the peoples of the several states must sink or swim together, and that in the long run…
• Justice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances.
• I take judge-made law as one of the existing realities of life.
• Not honesty alone, but the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive, is then the standard of behavior.
• Fraud includes the pretense of knowledge when knowledge there is none.
• In the end the great truth will have been learned that the quest is greater than what is sought, the effort finer that the prize…
• Opinion has a significance proportioned to the sources that sustain it.
• The heroic hours of life do not announce their presence by drum and trumpet.
• Method is much, technique is much, but inspiration is even more.
• The final cause of law is the welfare of society.
• As I search the archives of my memory I seem to discern six types or methods [of judicial writing] which divide themselves from one another…
• Law never is, but is always about to be.
• Prophecy, however honest, is generally a poor substitute for experience.
• The risk to be percieved defines the duty to be obeyed.
• Membership in the bar is a privilege burdened with conditions.
• The heroic hours of life do not announce their presence by drum and trumpet, challenging us to be true to ourselves by appeals to the…

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