Consequences cannot alter statutes, but may help to fix their meaning.
BENJAMIN CARDOZOEvery human being of adult years and sound mind has a legal right to determine what shall be done with his own body.
More Benjamin Cardozo Quotes
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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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Due process is a growth too sturdy to succumb to the infection of the least ingredient of error.
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The final cause of law is the welfare of society.
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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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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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Inaction without more is not tantamount to choice.
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Rest and motion, unrelieved and unchecked, are equally destructive.
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Prophecy, however honest, is generally a poor substitute for experience.
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The difference is no less real because it is of degree.
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I take judge-made law as one of the existing realities of life.
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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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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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There are vogues and fashions in jurisprudence as in literature and art and dress.
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The heroic hours of life do not announce their presence by drum and trumpet.
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Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO