Every human being of adult years and sound mind has a legal right to determine what shall be done with his own body.
BENJAMIN CARDOZOFreedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.
More Benjamin Cardozo Quotes
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Not honesty alone, but the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive, is then the standard of behavior.
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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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The risk to be percieved defines the duty to be obeyed.
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Inaction without more is not tantamount to choice.
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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.
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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 difference is no less real because it is of degree.
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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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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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Membership in the bar is a privilege burdened with conditions.
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Law never is, but is always about to be.
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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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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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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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There are vogues and fashions in jurisprudence as in literature and art and dress.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO