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

Benjamin Cardozo

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

Illuminating Past
Code is followed by commentary, and commentary by revision, and thus the task is never done.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Done Revision Tasks
Prophecy, however honest, is generally a poor substitute for experience.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Honest Poor Substitutes
Rest and motion, unrelieved and unchecked, are equally destructive.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Destructive Unchecked Unrelieved
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
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.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Confidence Giving Judging Philosophy
The great tides and currents which engulf the rest of men do not turn aside in their course and pass the judges by.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Judging Men Tides
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 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.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Long Running Swim
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
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.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Example Hands Humility
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
Opinion has a significance proportioned to the sources that sustain it.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Opinion Significance Source
There are vogues and fashions in jurisprudence as in literature and art and dress.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Art Dresses Fashion
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
Not honesty alone, but the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive, is then the standard of behavior.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Honesty Honor Sensitive

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

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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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