Learned Hand Quotes
-
Today in America vast concourses of youth are flocking to our colleges, eager for something, just what they do not know.
→ -
There is something monstrous in commands couched in invented and unfamiliar language; an alien master is the worst of all. The language of the law must not be foreign to the ears of those who are to obey it.
→ -
You cannot raise the standard against oppression, or leap into the breach to relieve injustice, and still keep an open mind to every disconcerting fact, or an open ear to the cold voice of doubt. I am satisfied that a scholar who tries to combine these parts sells his birthright for a mess of pottage; that, when the final count is made, it will be found that the impairment of his powers far outweighs any possible contribution to the causes he has espoused.
→ -
All discussion, all debate, all dissidence tends to question and in consequence, to upset existing convictions; that is precisely its purpose and its justification.
→ -
Tyranny is tyranny, no matter what its form; the free man will resist it if his courage serves.
→ -
That community is already in the process of dissolution where each man begins to eye his neighbor as a possible enemy, where non-conformity with the accepted creed, political as well as religious, is a mark of disaffection; where denunciation, without specification or backing, takes the place of evidence; where orthodoxy chokes freedom of dissent; where faith in the eventual supremacy of reason has become so timid that we dare not enter our convictions in the open lists, to win or lose.
→ -
You cannot raise the standard against oppression, or leap into the breach to relieve injustice, and still keep an open mind to every disconcerting fact, or an open ear to the cold voice of doubt.
→ -
The profession of the law of which he [a judge] is a part is charged with the articulation and final incidence of the successive efforts towards justice; it must feel the circulation of the communal blood or it will wither and drop off, a useless member.
→ -
The public official must pick his way nicely, must learn to placate though not to yield too much, to have the art of honeyed words but not to seem neutral, and above all to keep constantly audible, visible, likable, even kissable.
→ -
There is no fury like that against one who, we fear, may succeed in making us disloyal to beliefs we hold with passion, but have not really won.
→ -
It is of course true that any kind of judicial legislation is objectionable on the score of the limited interests which a Court can represent, yet there are wrongs which in fact legislatures cannot be brought to take an interest in, at least not until the Courts have acted.
→ -
There is no surer way to misread any document than to read it literally. As nearly as we can, we must put ourselves in the place of those who uttered the words, and try to divine how they would have dealt with the unforeseen situation; and, although their words are by far the most decisive evidence of what they would have done, they are by no means final.
→ -
The condition of our survival in any but the meagerest existence is our willingness to accommodate ourselves to the conflicting interests of others, to learn to live in a social world.
→ -
I had rather take my chance that some traitors will escape detection than spread abroad a spirit of general suspicion and distrust, which accepts rumor and gossip in place of undismayed and unintimidated inquiry.
→ -
It was not the violence of our enemies [in World War I] that would undo us, I thought, but our own spiritual weakness, the shallowness of our convictions.
→ -
The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understands the minds of other men and women.
→ -
We prate of freedom; we are in deadly fear of life, as much of our own American scene betrays.
→ -
The use of history is to tell us what we are, for at our birth we are nearly empty vessels and we become what our tradition pours into us.
→ -
Life is made up of a series of judgments on insufficient data, and if we waited to run down all our doubts, it would flow past us.
→ -
Those of us who have come to years of discretion and more, must often take to retrospect, and seek to appraise the outcome of our lives.
→ -
We all have our prayer-wheels which we set up on the steppes. The indifferent winds come and carry most of them away to gasp out their little lives in the desert, for few reach heaven.
→ -
As soon as we cease to pry about at random, we shall come to rely upon accredited bodies of authoritative dogma; and as soon as we come to rely upon accredited bodies of authoritative dogma, not only are the days of our liberty over, but we have lost the password that has hitherto opened to us the gates of success as well.
→ -
For, when all is said, as my friend George Rublee likes to put it, the only success is to be a success as a person; and it is still not too late for that.
→ -
Heretics have been hated from the beginning of recorded time; they have been ostracized, exiled, tortured, maimed, and butchered; but it has generally proved impossible to smother them; and when it has not, the society that has succeeded has always declined.
→ -
The legal relations between the individual and the community which arise out of the production and distribution of property, comprise by far the greater, and more important, part of the law; subtract these and very little content would be left.
→ -
Seldom, if ever, does wisdom come, shall we punish it if it comes late?
→ -
We shall succeed only so far as we continue to undertake “the intolerable labor of thought” — that most distasteful of all our activities.
→ -
A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few.
→ -
What seems fair enough against a squalid huckster of bad liquor may take on a different face, if used by a government determined to suppress political opposition under the guise of sedition.
→ -
How long shall we blunder along without the aid of unpartisan and authoritative scientific assistance in the administration of justice, no one knows; but all fair persons not conventionalized by provincial legal habits of mind ought, I should think, unite to effect some change.
→
Related Authors
-
Louis D. Brandeis Former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States -
Antonin Scalia Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States -
Guido Calabresi Judge -
Benjamin Cardozo Former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States -
Mary Ann Glendon United States Ambassador to the Holy See -
Ronald Dworkin Philosopher -
Felix Frankfurter Former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States -
-
John Stuart Mill Philosopher -
Robert H. Jackson Former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States -
Zechariah Chafee Philosopher -
Richard Posner Jurist -
Harold Laski Economist -
Harlan F. Stone Former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States -
-
John Rawls Philosopher -
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States -
Richard Jordan Television actor -
-
Hugo Black Former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States