The heroic hours of life do not announce their presence by drum and trumpet.
BENJAMIN CARDOZOLaw never is, but is always about to be.
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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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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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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Inaction without more is not tantamount to choice.
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Opinion has a significance proportioned to the sources that sustain it.
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Justice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances.
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Prophecy, however honest, is generally a poor substitute for experience.
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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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The great generalities of the constitution have a content and a significance that vary from age to age.
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In truth, I am nothing but a plodding mediocrity – please observe, a plodding mediocrity – for a mere mediocrity does not go very far, but a plodding one gets quite a distance. There is joy in that success, and a distinction can come from courage, fidelity and industry.
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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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The risk to be percieved defines the duty to be obeyed.
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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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Fraud includes the pretense of knowledge when knowledge there is none.
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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.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO