Danger invites rescue. … The wrongdoer may not have foreseen the coming of a deliverer. He is accountable as if he had.
BENJAMIN CARDOZOProphecy, however honest, is generally a poor substitute for experience.
More Benjamin Cardozo Quotes
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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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Due process is a growth too sturdy to succumb to the infection of the least ingredient of error.
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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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History or custom or social utility or some compelling sense of justice or sometimes perhaps a semi-intuitive apprehension of the pervading spirit of our law must come to the rescue of the anxious judge and tell him where to go.
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Prophecy, however honest, is generally a poor substitute for experience.
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Membership in the bar is a privilege burdened with conditions.
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Law never is, but is always about to be.
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Rest and motion, unrelieved and unchecked, are equally destructive.
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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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The great tides and currents which engulf the rest of men do not turn aside in their course and pass the judges by.
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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 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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I take judge-made law as one of the existing realities of life.
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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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Method is much, technique is much, but inspiration is even more.
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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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Opinion has a significance proportioned to the sources that sustain it.
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The risk to be percieved defines the duty to be obeyed.
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Justice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances.
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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.
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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 validity of a tax depends upon its nature, and not upon its name.
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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 heroic hours of life do not announce their presence by drum and trumpet.
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Consequences cannot alter statutes, but may help to fix their meaning.
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Inaction without more is not tantamount to choice.
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