Benjamin Cardozo Quotes

Justice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances.

Method is much, technique is much, but inspiration is even more.

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.

Law never is, but is always about to be.

The judge is not the knight-errant, roaming at will in pursuit of his own ideal of beauty or of goodness.

Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.

History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.

The final cause of law is the welfare of society.

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.

There are vogues and fashions in jurisprudence as in literature and art and dress.

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.

The great tides and currents which engulf the rest of men do not turn aside in their course and pass the judges by.

Rest and motion, unrelieved and unchecked, are equally destructive.

We seek to find peace of mind in the word, the formula, the ritual. The hope is illusion.

Consequences cannot alter statutes, but may help to fix their meaning.

Fraud includes the pretense of knowledge when knowledge there is none.

The heroic hours of life do not announce their presence by drum and trumpet.

Membership in the bar is a privilege burdened with conditions.

The prophet and the martyr do not see the hooting throng. Their eyes are fixed on the eternities.

Due process is a growth too sturdy to succumb to the infection of the least ingredient of error.

Opinion has a significance proportioned to the sources that sustain it.

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.

Inaction without more is not tantamount to choice.

Expediency may tip the scales when arguments are nicely balanced.

No judicial system could do society's work if each issue had to be decided afresh in every case which raised it.

The repetition of a catchword can hold analysis in fetters for fifty years or more.

The risk to be percieved defines the duty to be obeyed.

Code is followed by commentary, and commentary by revision, and thus the task is never done.

Not honesty alone, but the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive, is then the standard of behavior.

The great generalities of the constitution have a content and a significance that vary from age to age.

I take judge-made law as one of the existing realities of life.

Prophecy, however honest, is generally a poor substitute for experience.

Every human being of adult years and sound mind has a legal right to determine what shall be done with his own body.

The validity of a tax depends upon its nature, and not upon its name.

The difference is no less real because it is of degree.

Danger invites rescue. ... The wrongdoer may not have foreseen the coming of a deliverer. He is accountable as if he had.

The constant assumption runs throughout the law that the natural and spontaneous evolutions of habit fix the limits of right and wrong.

It is when the colors do not match, when the references in the index fail, when there is no decisive precedent, that the serious business of the judge begins