Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Benjamin N. Cardozo
Benjamin N. Cardozo Quotes
60 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Often a liberal antidote of experience supplies a sovereign cure for a paralyzing abstraction built upon a theory.
Benjamin N. Cardozo
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Rest and motion, unrelieved and unchecked, are equally destructive.
Benjamin N. Cardozo
Source
Report...
[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.
Benjamin N. Cardozo
Source
Report...
My analysis of the judicial process comes then to this, and little more: logic, and history, and custom, and utility, and the accepted standards of right conduct, are the forces which singly or in combination shape the progress of the law. Which of these forces dominate depends largely upon the comparative importance or value of the social interests that will be thereby promoted or impaired. … The most fundamental social interest is that law shall be uniform and impartial. … Uniformity ceases to be a good when it becomes uniformity of oppression.
Benjamin N. Cardozo
Source
Report...
Due process is a growth too sturdy to succumb to the infection of the least ingredient of error.
Benjamin N. Cardozo
Source
Report...
Fraud includes the pretense of knowledge when knowledge there is none.
Benjamin N. Cardozo
Source
Report...
What has once been settled by a precedent will not be unsettled overnight, for certainty and uniformity are gains not lightly sacrificed. Above all is this true when honest men have shaped their conduct on the faith of the pronouncement.
Benjamin N. Cardozo
Source
Report...
The great tides and currents which engulf the rest of men do not turn aside in their course and pass the judges by.
Benjamin N. Cardozo
Source
Report...
It is well enough to say that we shall be consistent, but consistent with what?... The origins of the rule? The course and tendency of development? With logic or philosophy? With the fundamental conceptions of jurisprudence? All these loyalties are possible. All have sometimes prevailed.
Benjamin N. Cardozo
Source
Report...
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.
Benjamin N. Cardozo
Source
Report...
Three great mysteries there are in the lives of mortal beings: the mystery of birth at the beginning; the mystery of death at the end; and greater than either, the mystery of love. Everything that is most precious in life is a form of love. Art is a form of love, if it be noble; labor is a form of love, if it be worthy; thought is a form of love, if it be inspired.
Benjamin N. Cardozo
Source
Report...
The heroic hours of life do not announce their presence by drum and trumpet.
Benjamin N. Cardozo
Source
Report...
Of that freedom one may say that it is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.
Benjamin N. Cardozo
Source
Report...
Our course of advance... is neither a straight line nor a curve. It is a series of dots and dashes. Progress comes per saltum, by successive compromises between extremes, compromises often between positivism and idealism.
Benjamin N. Cardozo
Source
Report...
Membership in the bar is a privilege burdened with conditions.
Benjamin N. Cardozo
Source
Report...
I sometimes think that we worry ourselves overmuch about the enduring consequences of our errors. They may work a little confusion for a time. In the end, they will be modified or corrected or their teachings ignored. The future takes care of such things. In the endless process of testing and retesting, there is a constant rejection of the dross, and a constant retention of whatever is pure and sound and fine.
Benjamin N. Cardozo
Source
Report...
Price security, we are told, is only a special form of sanitary security; the economic motive is secondary and subordinate; the state intervenes to make its inhabitants healthy, and not to make them rich.
Benjamin N. Cardozo
Source
Report...
The state in commissioning its judges has commanded them to judge, but neither in constitution nor in statute has it formulated a code to define the manner of their judging. The pressure of society invests new forms of conduct in the minds of the multitude with the sanction of moral obligation, and the same pressure working upon the mind of the judge invests them finally through his action with the sanction of the law.
Benjamin N. Cardozo
Source
Report...
When asked who among his eight colleagues was the greatest living American jurist:
The greatest living American jurist isn't on the Supreme Court.
Reffering to Learned Hand
Benjamin N. Cardozo
Source
Report...
Code is followed by commentary, and commentary by revision, and thus the task is never done.
Benjamin N. Cardozo
Source
Report...
The great generalities of the constitution have a content and a significance that vary from age to age.
Benjamin N. Cardozo
Source
Report...
I do not underrate the yearning for mechanical and formal tests. They are possible and useful in zones upon the legal sphere. The pain of choosing is the pain of marking off such zones from others. It is a pain we must endure, for uniformity of method will carry us upon the rocks. The curse of this fluidity, of an ever shifting approximation, is one the law must bear, or other curses yet more dreadful will be invited in exchange.
Benjamin N. Cardozo
1
2
3
Quote of the day
Be a sinner and sin strongly, but more strongly have faith and rejoice in Christ.
Martin Luther
Benjamin N. Cardozo
Creative Commons
Born:
May 24, 1870
Died:
July 9, 1938
(aged 68)
Bio:
Benjamin Nathan Cardozo was an American jurist who served on the New York Court of Appeals and later as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.
Most used words:
law
form
judge
forces
life
social
rule
type
love
process
liberty
certainty
freedom
uniformity
experience
Benjamin N. Cardozo on Wikipedia
Benjamin N. Cardozo works on Gutenberg Project
Benjamin N. Cardozo works on Wikisource
Suggest an edit or a new quote
Benjamin N. Cardozo Quotes
Benjamin N. Cardozo Short Quotes
American Judge Quotes
Judge Quotes
19th-century Judge Quotes
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes