Code is followed by commentary, and commentary by revision, and thus the task is never done.
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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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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I take judge-made law as one of the existing realities of life.
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The heroic hours of life do not announce their presence by drum and trumpet.
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Due process is a growth too sturdy to succumb to the infection of the least ingredient of error.
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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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The final cause of law is the welfare of society.
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Fraud includes the pretense of knowledge when knowledge there is none.
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No judicial system could do society’s work if each issue had to be decided afresh in every case which raised it.
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Inaction without more is not tantamount to choice.
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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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There are vogues and fashions in jurisprudence as in literature and art and dress.
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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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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.
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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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The prophet and the martyr do not see the hooting throng. Their eyes are fixed on the eternities.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO







