Benjamin Cardozo Quotes
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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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Method is much, technique is much, but inspiration is even more.
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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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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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Consequences cannot alter statutes, but may help to fix their meaning.
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The prophet and the martyr do not see the hooting throng. Their eyes are fixed on the eternities.
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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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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.
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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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Prophecy, however honest, is generally a poor substitute for experience.
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The constant assumption runs throughout the law that the natural and spontaneous evolutions of habit fix the limits of right and wrong.
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Expediency may tip the scales when arguments are nicely balanced.
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The Constitution was framed upon the theory that the peoples of the several states must sink or swim together, and that in the long run prosperity and salvation are in union and not division.
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Code is followed by commentary, and commentary by revision, and thus the task is never done.
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The heroic hours of life do not announce their presence by drum and trumpet, challenging us to be true to ourselves by appeals to the martial spirit that keeps the blood at heat. Some little, unassuming, unobtrusive choice presents itself before us slyly and craftily, glib and insinuating, in the modest garb of innocence. . . . Then it is that you will be summoned to show the courage of adventurous youth.
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The heroic hours of life do not announce their presence by drum and trumpet.
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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 judge is not the knight-errant, roaming at will in pursuit of his own ideal of beauty or of goodness.
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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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As I search the archives of my memory I seem to discern six types or methods [of judicial writing] which divide themselves from one another with measurable distinctness. There is the type magisterial or imperative; the type laconic or sententious; the type conversational or homely; the type refined or artificial, smelling of the lamp, verging at times upon preciosity or euphuism; the demonstrative or persuasive; and finally the type tonsorial or agglutinative, so called from the shears and the pastepot which are its implements and emblem.
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In our worship of certainty we must distinguish between the sound certainty and the sham, between what is gold and what is tinsel; and then, when certainty is attained, we must remember that it is not the only good; that we can buy it at too high a price; that there is danger in perpetual quiescence as well as in perpetual motion; and that a compromise must be found in a principle of growth.
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Law never is, but is always about to be.
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Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.
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History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.
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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.
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Rest and motion, unrelieved and unchecked, are equally destructive.
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Justice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances.
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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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Benjamin Cardozo
- Born: May 24, 1870
- Died: July 9, 1938
- Occupation: Former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
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