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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.

Benjamin Cardozo

The heroic hours of life do not announce their presence by drum and trumpet.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Heroic Hours Trumpet
Danger invites rescue. … The wrongdoer may not have foreseen the coming of a deliverer. He is accountable as if he had.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Danger May Rescue
Not honesty alone, but the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive, is then the standard of behavior.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Honesty Honor Sensitive
The great generalities of the constitution have a content and a significance that vary from age to age.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Age Constitution Significance
Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Expression Form Freedom
Fraud includes the pretense of knowledge when knowledge there is none.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Fraud Include Knowledge Pretense
The constant assumption runs throughout the law that the natural and spontaneous evolutions of habit fix the limits of right and wrong.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Law Limitation Running
The prophet and the martyr do not see the hooting throng. Their eyes are fixed on the eternities.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Eternity Eye Prophet
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

Dark Mind Years
History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Illuminating Past
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.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Decision Justice Taken
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.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Example Hands Humility
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.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Long Running Swim
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.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Distance Doe Joy
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.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Confidence Giving Judging Philosophy
The final cause of law is the welfare of society.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Competition Finals Law

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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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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