Quotes · Skopia

19 quotes

SortEditorial Year Length

Person·Learned Hand✕clear

Legal opinion · Legal writing

Political agitation, by the passions it arouses or the convictions it engenders, may in fact stimulate men to the violation of law. Detestation of existing policies is easily transformed into forcible resistance of the authority which puts them in execution, and it would be folly to disregard the causal relation between tire two. Yet to assimilate agitation, legitimate as such, with direct incitement to violent resistance, is to disregard the tolerance of all methods of political agitation which in normal times is a safeguard of free government.

Masses Pub Co. v. Patten · 1917

★ 1.8

Legal opinion · Legal writing

Our procedure has been always haunted by the ghost of the innocent man convicted. It is an unreal dream. What we need to fear is the archaic formalism and the watery sentiment that obstructs, delays, and defeats the prosecution of crime.

United States v. Garsson · 1923

★ 1.8

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.

1931

★ 1.8

Legal opinion · Legal writing

Any one may so arrange his affairs that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which will best pay the Treasury.

Helvering v. Gregory · 1934

★ 1.8

The day has clearly gone forever of societies small enough for their members to have personal acquaintance with each another, and to find their station through the appraisal of those who have any first-hand knowledge of them. Publicity is an evil substitute and the art of publicity is a black art; but it has come to stay, every year adds to its potency and to the finality of its judgments. The hand that rules the press, the radio, the screen and the far-spread magazine, rules the country; whether we like it or not, we must learn to accept it.

1942

★ 1.8

Legal opinion · Legal writing

Right conclusions are more likely to be gathered out of a multitude of tongues, than through any kind of authoritative selection. To many this is, and will always be, folly; but we have staked upon it our all.

United States v. Associated Press · 1943

★ 1.8

We believe, and I think properly, that when the men who met in 1787 to make a Constitution made the best political document ever made, they did so very largely because they were great compromisers.

1951

★ 1.8

The mid-day sun is too much for most eyes; one is dazzled even with its reflection. Be careful that too broad and high an aim does not paralyze your effort and clog your springs of action.

1893

★ 1.9

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.

1939

★ 1.9

Life is made up of constant calls to action, and we seldom have time for more than hastily contrived answers.

1952

★ 1.9

Life is not a thing of knowing only—nay, mere knowledge has properly no place at all save as it becomes the handmaiden of feeling and emotion.

1893

★ 1.9

Our dangers, as it seems to me, are not from the outrageous but from the conforming; not from those who rarely and under the lurid glare of obloquy upset our moral complaisance, or shock us with unaccustomed conduct, but from those, the mass of us, who take their virtues and their tastes, like their shirts and their furniture, from the limited patterns which the market offers.

1927

★ 3.5

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 understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned, but has never quite forgotten; that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest.

1944

★ 3.5

The history of man has just begun: in the aeons which lie before him lie limitless hope or limitless despair. The choice is his; the present choice is ours. It is worth the trial.

1945

★ 3.5

"I beseech ye in the bowels of Christ, think that ye may be mistaken." I should like to have that written over the portals of every church, every school, and every court house, and, may I say, of every legislative body in the United States. I should like to have every court begin, "I beseech ye in the bowels of Christ, think that we may be mistaken."

1951

★ 3.5

That community is already in process of dissolution where each man begins to eye his neighbor as a possible enemy, where nonconformity with the accepted creed, political as well as religious, is a mark of disaffection; where denuciation, 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.

1952

★ 3.5

Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it.

1944

★ 3.5

Right knows no boundaries, and justice no frontiers; the brotherhood of man is not a domestic institution.

1945

★ 3.5

This much I think I do know—that a society so riven that the spirit of moderation is gone, no court can save; that a society where the spirit flourishes, no court need save; that in a society which evades its responsibility by thrusting upon the courts the nurture of that spirit, that spirit in the end will perish.

1942

★ 4.3