The great tides and currents which engulf the rest of men do not turn aside in their course and pass the judges by.
BENJAMIN CARDOZOHistory 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.
More Benjamin Cardozo Quotes
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The risk to be percieved defines the duty to be obeyed.
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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, 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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Opinion has a significance proportioned to the sources that sustain it.
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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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Rest and motion, unrelieved and unchecked, are equally destructive.
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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 heroic hours of life do not announce their presence by drum and trumpet.
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Inaction without more is not tantamount to choice.
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There are vogues and fashions in jurisprudence as in literature and art and dress.
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Not honesty alone, but the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive, is then the standard of behavior.
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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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The final cause of law is the welfare of society.
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Fraud includes the pretense of knowledge when knowledge there is none.
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The difference is no less real because it is of degree.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO








