We seek to find peace of mind in the word, the formula, the ritual. The hope is illusion.
BENJAMIN CARDOZOThe prophet and the martyr do not see the hooting throng. Their eyes are fixed on the eternities.
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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Opinion has a significance proportioned to the sources that sustain it.
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Membership in the bar is a privilege burdened with conditions.
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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 prophet and the martyr do not see the hooting throng. Their eyes are fixed on the eternities.
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The final cause of law is the welfare of society.
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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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Inaction without more is not tantamount to choice.
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Prophecy, however honest, is generally a poor substitute for experience.
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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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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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Fraud includes the pretense of knowledge when knowledge there is none.
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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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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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Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO