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.
BENJAMIN CARDOZOIt 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.
More Benjamin Cardozo Quotes
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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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Every human being of adult years and sound mind has a legal right to determine what shall be done with his own body.
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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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The prophet and the martyr do not see the hooting throng. Their eyes are fixed on the eternities.
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The heroic hours of life do not announce their presence by drum and trumpet.
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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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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.
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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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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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Membership in the bar is a privilege burdened with conditions.
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There are vogues and fashions in jurisprudence as in literature and art and dress.
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Method is much, technique is much, but inspiration is even more.
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Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO