Learned Hand Quotes

81 quotes in 1158 categories

• 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…
• If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: thou shalt not ration justice.
• That community is already in the process of dissolution where each man begins to eye his neighbor as a possible enemy, where non-conformity with the…
• I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon law and upon courts. These are false hopes, believe me,…
• Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best…
• The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks…
• What seems fair enough against a squalid huckster of bad liquor may take on a different face, if used by a government determined to suppress…
• In america, there are two tax systems: one for the informed and one for the uninformed. Both are legal
• The language of the law must not be foreign to the ears of those who are to obey it.
• We prate of freedom; we are in deadly fear of life, as much of our own American scene betrays.
• 'I beseech ye . . . , think that ye may be mistaken.' I should like to have that written over the portals of every…
• Right knows no boundaries, and justice no frontiers; the brotherhood of man is not a domestic institution.
• Words are chameleons, which reflect the color of their environment.
• Life is made up of constant calls to action, and we seldom have time for more than hastily contrived answers.
• Convention is like the shell to the chick, a protection till he is strong enough to break it through.
• Since we are men, we will play the part of Man.
• 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…
• Our dangers, as it seems to me, are not from the outrageous but from the conforming; not from those who rarely and under the lurid…
• 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…
• 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…

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