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Consequences cannot alter statutes, but may help to fix their meaning.

Benjamin Cardozo

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

Illuminating Past
We seek to find peace of mind in the word, the formula, the ritual. The hope is illusion.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

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

Heroic Hours Trumpet
There are vogues and fashions in jurisprudence as in literature and art and dress.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Art Dresses Fashion
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
Rest and motion, unrelieved and unchecked, are equally destructive.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Destructive Unchecked Unrelieved
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.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Games Struggle Truth
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

Equality Erosion Liberty
The judge is not the knight-errant, roaming at will in pursuit of his own ideal of beauty or of goodness.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Judging Knights Roaming
The difference is no less real because it is of degree.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Degrees Differences Real
The great generalities of the constitution have a content and a significance that vary from age to age.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Age Constitution Significance
Code is followed by commentary, and commentary by revision, and thus the task is never done.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Done Revision Tasks
No judicial system could do society’s work if each issue had to be decided afresh in every case which raised it.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Issue Judicial Raise Sysdtem
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
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.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Justice Mind Ordinary
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

Consequences cannot alter statutes, but may help to fix their meaning.

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Consequences cannot alter statutes, but may help to fix their meaning.

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Popular Authors

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