The constant assumption runs throughout the law that the natural and spontaneous evolutions of habit fix the limits of right and wrong.
BENJAMIN CARDOZOThe heroic hours of life do not announce their presence by drum and trumpet.
More Benjamin Cardozo Quotes
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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 judge is not the knight-errant, roaming at will in pursuit of his own ideal of beauty or of goodness.
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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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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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In truth, I am nothing but a plodding mediocrity – please observe, a plodding mediocrity – for a mere mediocrity does not go very far, but a plodding one gets quite a distance. There is joy in that success, and a distinction can come from courage, fidelity and industry.
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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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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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We seek to find peace of mind in the word, the formula, the ritual. The hope is illusion.
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I take judge-made law as one of the existing realities of life.
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Opinion has a significance proportioned to the sources that sustain it.
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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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The risk to be percieved defines the duty to be obeyed.
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History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.
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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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Law never is, but is always about to be.
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Membership in the bar is a privilege burdened with conditions.
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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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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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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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The difference is no less real because it is of degree.
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Prophecy, however honest, is generally a poor substitute for experience.
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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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Justice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances.
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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.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO