Inaction without more is not tantamount to choice.
BENJAMIN CARDOZOEvery human being of adult years and sound mind has a legal right to determine what shall be done with his own body.
More Benjamin Cardozo Quotes
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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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The validity of a tax depends upon its nature, and not upon its name.
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The difference is no less real because it is of degree.
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Justice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances. Substitute statute for decision, and you shift the center of authority, but add no quota of inspired wisdom.
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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 prosperity and salvation are in union and not division.
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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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It is for ordinary minds, not for psychoanalysts, that our rules of evidence are framed. They have their source very often in considerations of administrative convenience, or practical expediency, and not in rules of logic.
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Opinion has a significance proportioned to the sources that sustain it.
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Law never is, but is always about to be.
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Code is followed by commentary, and commentary by revision, and thus the task is never done.
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The great generalities of the constitution have a content and a significance that vary from age to age.
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Justice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances.
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The prophet and the martyr do not see the hooting throng. Their eyes are fixed on the eternities.
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The heroic hours of life do not announce their presence by drum and trumpet.
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History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.
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Membership in the bar is a privilege burdened with conditions.
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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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Rest and motion, unrelieved and unchecked, are equally destructive.
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The final cause of law is the welfare of society.
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The judge is not the knight-errant, roaming at will in pursuit of his own ideal of beauty or of goodness.
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The constant assumption runs throughout the law that the natural and spontaneous evolutions of habit fix the limits of right and wrong.
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Fraud includes the pretense of knowledge when knowledge there is none.
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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 this true when honest men have shaped their conduct on the faith of the pronouncement.
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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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Prophecy, however honest, is generally a poor substitute for experience.
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Justice, though due to the accused, is due the accuser also. The concept of fairness cannot be strained till it is narrowed to a filament. We are to keep our balance true.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO