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 CARDOZOThe constant assumption runs throughout the law that the natural and spontaneous evolutions of habit fix the limits of right and wrong.
More Benjamin Cardozo Quotes
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The great ideals of liberty and equality are preserved against the assaults of opportunism, the expediency of the passing hour, the erosion of small encroachments, the scorn and derision of those who have no patience with general principles.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO -
Rest and motion, unrelieved and unchecked, are equally destructive.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO -
I take judge-made law as one of the existing realities of life.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO -
Fraud includes the pretense of knowledge when knowledge there is none.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO -
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.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO -
There are vogues and fashions in jurisprudence as in literature and art and dress.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO -
Not honesty alone, but the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive, is then the standard of behavior.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO -
History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO -
The heroic hours of life do not announce their presence by drum and trumpet.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO -
Opinion has a significance proportioned to the sources that sustain it.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO -
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 -
The validity of a tax depends upon its nature, and not upon its name.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO -
Prophecy, however honest, is generally a poor substitute for experience.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO -
Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO -
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.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO