Learned Hand Quotes

81 quotes in 1158 categories

• There is no surer way to misread any document than to read it literally. ... As nearly as we can, we must put ourselves in…
• Skepticism is my only gospel, but I don't want to make a dogma out of it.
• The mid-day sun is too much for most eyes; one is dazzled even with its reflection. Be careful that too broad and high an aim…
• 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…
• In the end it is worse to suppress dissent than to run the risk of heresy.
• It is enough that we set out to mold the motley stuff of life into some form of our own choosing; when we do, the…
• The aim of law is the maximum gratification of the nervous system of man.
• Any one may so arrange his affairs that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which…
• What to an outsider will be no more than the vigorous presentation of a conviction, to an employee may be the manifestation of a determination…
• The successful competitor, having been urged to compete, must not be turned on when he wins.
• 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…
• No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes the scripture.
• The hand that rules the press, the radio, the screen and the far-spread magazine, rules the country.
• The spirit of liberty is the spirit of him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned ... .
• 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,…
• Words are not pebbles in alien juxtaposition.
• I shall ask no more than that you agree with Dean Inge that even though counting heads is not an ideal way to govern, at…
• We shall succeed only so far as we continue that most distasteful of all activity, the intolerable labor of thought.
• There is no surer way to misread any document than to read it literally.
• Each one of us must in the end choose for himself how far he would like to leave our collective fate to the wayward vagaries…

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