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.
BENJAMIN CARDOZOThe final cause of law is the welfare of society.
More Benjamin Cardozo Quotes
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History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.
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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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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 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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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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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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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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The validity of a tax depends upon its nature, and not upon its name.
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There are vogues and fashions in jurisprudence as in literature and art and dress.
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Consequences cannot alter statutes, but may help to fix their meaning.
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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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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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Method is much, technique is much, but inspiration is even more.
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Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.
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