Learned Hand Quotes

81 quotes in 1158 categories

• 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.
• We lose the forest for the trees, forgetting, even so far as we think at all, that we are trustees for those who come after…
• The fathers who contrived and passed the Consititution were wise in their generation; as time passes, we come more and more to realize their powers…
• Every smallest step of modern industry depends upon a cooperation whose maintenance and regulation is the very stuff of law.
• 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…
• If a community decides that some conduct is prejudicial to itself, and so decides by numbers sufficient to impose its will upon dissenters, I know…
• I had rather take my chance that some traitors will escape detection than spread abroad a spirit of general suspicion and distrust, which accepts rumor…
• 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…
• Our common law is the stock instance of a combination of custom and its successive adaptations.
• Conservative political opinion in America cleaves to the tradition of the judge as passive interpreter, believing that his absolute loyalty to authoritative law is the…
• The profession of the law of which he [a judge] is a part is charged with the articulation and final incidence of the successive efforts…
• Liberty is so much latitude as the powerful choose to accord to the weak.
• The lawyer must either learn to live more capaciously or be content to find himself continuously less trusted, more circumscribed, till he becomes hardly more…
• There is something monstrous in commands couched in invented and unfamiliar language; an alien master is the worst of all. The language of the law…
• Today in America vast concourses of youth are flocking to our colleges, eager for something, just what they do not know.
• 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…
• The legal relations between the individual and the community which arise out of the production and distribution of property, comprise by far the greater, and…
• 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…
• The public official must pick his way nicely, must learn to placate though not to yield too much, to have the art of honeyed words…
• We recently had a referendum in New York about extending the forest preserve. The city voted for it by a large majority; yet as I…

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