Every human being of adult years and sound mind has a legal right to determine what shall be done with his own body.
BENJAMIN CARDOZONo judicial system could do society’s work if each issue had to be decided afresh in every case which raised it.
More Benjamin Cardozo Quotes
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The validity of a tax depends upon its nature, and not upon its name.
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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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Law never is, but is always about to be.
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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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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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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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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 judge is not the knight-errant, roaming at will in pursuit of his own ideal of beauty or of goodness.
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Code is followed by commentary, and commentary by revision, and thus the task is never done.
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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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Due process is a growth too sturdy to succumb to the infection of the least ingredient of error.
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Opinion has a significance proportioned to the sources that sustain it.
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There are vogues and fashions in jurisprudence as in literature and art and dress.
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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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History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO