History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.
BENJAMIN CARDOZOWith 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.
More Benjamin Cardozo Quotes
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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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History or custom or social utility or some compelling sense of justice or sometimes perhaps a semi-intuitive apprehension of the pervading spirit of our law must come to the rescue of the anxious judge and tell him where to go.
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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 risk to be percieved defines the duty to be obeyed.
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The validity of a tax depends upon its nature, and not upon its name.
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Membership in the bar is a privilege burdened with conditions.
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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.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO -
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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The final cause of law is the welfare of society.
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Opinion has a significance proportioned to the sources that sustain it.
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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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Prophecy, however honest, is generally a poor substitute for experience.
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Fraud includes the pretense of knowledge when knowledge there is none.
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Justice, though due to the accused, is due the accuser also. The concept of fairness cannot be strained till it is narrowed to a filament. We are to keep our balance true.
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I take judge-made law as one of the existing realities of life.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO








