The heroic hours of life do not announce their presence by drum and trumpet.
BENJAMIN CARDOZOJustice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances.
More Benjamin Cardozo Quotes
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Code is followed by commentary, and commentary by revision, and thus the task is never done.
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No judicial system could do society’s work if each issue had to be decided afresh in every case which raised it.
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Danger invites rescue. … The wrongdoer may not have foreseen the coming of a deliverer. He is accountable as if he had.
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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 scorn and derision of those who have no patience with general principles.
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There is in each of us a stream of tendency, whether you choose to call it philosophy or not, which gives coherence and direction to thought and action. Judges cannot escape that current any more than other mortals.
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Inaction without more is not tantamount to choice.
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Every human being of adult years and sound mind has a legal right to determine what shall be done with his own body.
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The difference is no less real because it is of degree.
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History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.
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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 (or rather, that the effort is the prize), the victory cheap and hollow were it not for the rigor of the game.
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Consequences cannot alter statutes, but may help to fix their meaning.
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I take judge-made law as one of the existing realities of life.
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Fraud includes the pretense of knowledge when knowledge there is none.
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With traps and obstacles and hazards confronting us on every hand, only blindness or indifference will fail to turn in all humility, for guidance or for warning, to the study of examples.
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Opinion has a significance proportioned to the sources that sustain it.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO