Benjamin N. Cardozo Quotes

60 Sourced Quotes

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. All their lives, forces which they do not recognize and cannot name, have been tugging at them — inherited instincts, traditional beliefs, acquired convictions; and the resultant is an outlook on life, a conception of social needs. … In this mental background every problem finds it setting. We may try to see things as objectively as we please. None the less, we can never see them with any eyes except our own.

Benjamin N. Cardozo
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.

Benjamin N. Cardozo
Bills of rights give assurance to the individual of the preservation of his liberty. They do not define the liberty they promise.

Benjamin N. Cardozo
The whole problem of the relation between parent and subsidiary corporations is one that is still enveloped in the mists of metaphor. Metaphors in law are to be narrowly watched, for starting as devices to liberate thought, they end often by enslaving it. We say at times that the corporate entity will be ignored when the parent corporation operates a business through a subsidiary which is characterized as an 'alias' or a 'dummy.'... Dominion may be so complete, interference so obtrusive, that by the general rules of agency the parent will be a principal and the subsidiary an agent.

Benjamin N. Cardozo
I have spoken of the forces of which judges avowedly avail to shape the form and content of their judgments. Even these forces are seldom fully in consciousness. They lie so near the surface, however, that their existence and influence are not likely to be disclaimed. But the subject is not exhausted with the recognition of their power. Deep below consciousness are other forces, the likes and the dislikes, the predilections and the prejudices, the complex of instincts and emotions and habits and convictions, which make the man, whether he be litigant or judge.

Benjamin N. Cardozo
The reconciliation of the irreconcilable, the merger of antitheses, the synthesis of opposites, these are the great problems of the law... We have the claims of stability to be harmonized with those of progress. We are to reconcile liberty with equality, and both of them with order. The property rights of the individual we are to respect, yet we are not to press them to the point at which they threaten the welfare or the security of the many. We must preserve to justice its universal quality, and yet leave to it the capacity to be individual and particular.

Benjamin N. Cardozo
There comes not seldom a crisis in the life of men, of nations, and of worlds, when the old forms seem ready to decay, and the old rules of action have lost their binding force. The evils of existing systems obscure the blessings that attend them; and, where reform is needed, the cry is raised for subversion.

Benjamin N. Cardozo
Expediency may tip the scales when arguments are nicely balanced.

Benjamin N. Cardozo
We like to picture to ourselves the field of law as accurately mapped and plotted. We draw our little lines, and they are hardly down before we blur them. As in time and space, so here. Divisions are working hypotheses, adopted for convenience. … So also the duty of a judge becomes itself a question of degree, and he is a useful judge or a poor one as he estimates the measure accurately or loosely. He must balance all his ingredients, his philosophy, his logic, his analogies, his history, his customs, his sense of right, and all the rest, and adding a little here and taking out a little there, must determine, as wisely as he can, which weight shall tip the scales.

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

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

Benjamin N. Cardozo
The law has outgrown its primitive stage of formalism when the precise word was the sovereign talisman, and every slip was fatal. It takes a broader view today. A promise may be lacking, and yet the whole writing may be "instinct with an obligation," imperfectly expressed. If that is so, there is a contract.

Benjamin N. Cardozo
In truth, I am nothing but a plodding mediocrity — please observe, a plodding mediocrity — for a mere mediocrity does not go very far, but a plodding one gets quite a distance. There is joy in that success, and a distinction can come from courage, fidelity and industry.

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

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

Benjamin N. Cardozo
The great ideals of liberty and equality are preserved against the assaults of opportunism, the expediency of the passing hour, the erosion of small encroachments, the scorn and derision of those who have no patience with general principles.

Benjamin N. Cardozo
Magic words and incantations are as fatal to our science as they are to any other. Methods, when classified and separated, acquire their true bearing and perspective as a means to an end, not as ends in themselves. We seek to find peace of mind in the word, the formula, the ritual. The hope is illusion.

Benjamin N. Cardozo
There is an accuracy that defeats itself by the over-emphasis of details.

Benjamin N. Cardozo
The judicial process, as was said at the outset of these lectures, is a process of search and comparison, and little else.

Benjamin N. Cardozo
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.

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

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

Benjamin N. Cardozo
Law, like other branches of social science, must be satisfied to test the validity of its conclusions by the logic of probabilities rather than the logic of certainty.

Benjamin N. Cardozo
Where the line is to be drawn the important and the trivial cannot be settled by a formula.

Benjamin N. Cardozo
History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.

Benjamin N. Cardozo
More truly characteristic of dissent is a dignity, an elevation, of mood and thought and phrase. Deep conviction and warm feeling are saying their last say with knowledge that the cause is lost. The voice of the majority may be that of force triumphant, content with the plaudits of the hour, and recking little of the morrow. The dissenter speaks to the future, and his voice is pitched to a key that will carry through the years.

Benjamin N. Cardozo
Often a liberal antidote of experience supplies a sovereign cure for a paralyzing abstraction built upon a theory.

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

Benjamin N. Cardozo
The theorist has a hard time to make his way in an ungrateful world. He is supposed to be indifferent to realities; yet his life is spent in the exposure of realities, which, till illuminated by his searchlight, were hidden and unknown.

Benjamin N. Cardozo
Rest and motion, unrelieved and unchecked, are equally destructive.

Benjamin N. Cardozo