A court which yields to the popular will thereby licenses itself to practice despotism, for there can be no assurance that it will not on another occasion indulge its own will.
--Felix Frankfurter
All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them.
--Felix Frankfurter
Answers are not obtained by putting the wrong question and thereby begging the real one.
--Felix Frankfurter
Fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalised medium of reason, that's all we have between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feelings.
--Felix Frankfurter
Gratitude is one of the least articulate of the emotions, especially when it is deep.
--Felix Frankfurter
If nowhere else, in the relation between Church and State, 'good fences make good neighbors.'
--Felix Frankfurter
If one man can be allowed to determine for himself what is law, every man can. That means first chaos, then tyranny. Legal process is an essential part of the democratic process.
--Felix Frankfurter
In a democratic society like ours, relief must come through an aroused popular conscience that sears the conscience of the people's representatives.
--Felix Frankfurter
It has not been unknown that judges persist in error to avoid giving the appearance of weakness and vacillation.
--Felix Frankfurter
It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have been forged in controversies involving not very nice people.
--Felix Frankfurter
It is a wise man who said that there is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals.
--Felix Frankfurter
It would be a narrow conception of jurisprudence to confine the notion of 'laws' to what is found written on the statute books, and to disregard the gloss which life has written upon it.
--Felix Frankfurter
Lines should not be drawn simply for the sake of drawing lines.
--Felix Frankfurter
Litigation is the pursuit of practical ends, not a game of chess.
--Felix Frankfurter
Morals are three-quarters manners.
--Felix Frankfurter
National unity is the basis of national security.
--Felix Frankfurter
No court can make time stand still.
--Felix Frankfurter
No judge writes on a wholly clean slate.
--Felix Frankfurter
One is entitled to say without qualification that the correlation between prior judicial experience and fitness for the Supreme Court is zero.
--Felix Frankfurter
One who belongs to the most vilified and persecuted minority in history is not likely to be insensible to the freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution... But as judges we are neither Jew nor Gentile, neither Catholic nor agnostic.
--Felix Frankfurter
The eternal struggle in the law between constancy and change is largely a struggle between history and reason, between past reason and present needs.
--Felix Frankfurter
The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards.
--Felix Frankfurter
The indispensible judicial requisite is intellectual humility.
--Felix Frankfurter
The mode by which the inevitable is reached is effort.
--Felix Frankfurter
The most constructive way of resolving conflicts is to avoid them.
--Felix Frankfurter
The words of the Constitution... are so unrestricted by their intrinsic meaning or by their history or by tradition or by prior decisions that they leave the individual Justice free, if indeed they do not compel him, to gather meaning not from reading the Constitution but from reading life.
--Felix Frankfurter
Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.
--Felix Frankfurter
Without a free press there can be no free society. That is axiomatic. However, freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of a free society. The scope and nature of the constitutional guarantee of the freedom of the press are to be viewed and applied in that light.
--Felix Frankfurter
Found 28 occurence(s) in 51,848 quotation(s).