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 CARDOZOThe risk to be percieved defines the duty to be obeyed.
More Benjamin Cardozo Quotes
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I take judge-made law as one of the existing realities of life.
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Prophecy, however honest, is generally a poor substitute for experience.
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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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Rest and motion, unrelieved and unchecked, are equally destructive.
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Method is much, technique is much, but inspiration is even more.
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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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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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Law never is, but is always about to be.
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The constant assumption runs throughout the law that the natural and spontaneous evolutions of habit fix the limits of right and wrong.
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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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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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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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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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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