Consequences cannot alter statutes, but may help to fix their meaning.
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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The great generalities of the constitution have a content and a significance that vary from age to age.
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Justice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances.
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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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There are vogues and fashions in jurisprudence as in literature and art and dress.
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The prophet and the martyr do not see the hooting throng. Their eyes are fixed on the eternities.
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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.
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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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Inaction without more is not tantamount to choice.
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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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The difference is no less real because it is of degree.
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History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.
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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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Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.
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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.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO