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 CARDOZOIn 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.
More Benjamin Cardozo Quotes
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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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Inaction without more is not tantamount to choice.
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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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History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.
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Method is much, technique is much, but inspiration is even more.
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Consequences cannot alter statutes, but may help to fix their meaning.
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The final cause of law is the welfare of society.
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The judge is not the knight-errant, roaming at will in pursuit of his own ideal of beauty or of goodness.
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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.
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Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.
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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.
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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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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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Rest and motion, unrelieved and unchecked, are equally destructive.
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Fraud includes the pretense of knowledge when knowledge there is none.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO