Benjamin N. Cardozo Quotes

60 Sourced Quotes

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

Benjamin N. Cardozo
Fraud includes the pretense of knowledge when knowledge there is none.

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

Benjamin N. Cardozo
Of that freedom one may say that it is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.

Benjamin N. Cardozo
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
Membership in the bar is a privilege burdened with conditions.

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

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

Benjamin N. Cardozo
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
Method is much, technique is much, but inspiration is even more.

Benjamin N. Cardozo
A judge is to give effect in general not to his own scale of values, but to the scale of values revealed to him in his readings of the social mind. … Objective tests may fail him, or may be confused as to bewilder. He must then look within himself.

Benjamin N. Cardozo
As I search the archives of my memory I seem to discern six types or methods which divide themselves from one another with measurable distinctness. There is the type magisterial or imperative; the type laconic or sententious; the type conversational or homely; the type refined or artificial, smelling of the lamp, verging at times upon preciosity or euphuism; the demonstrative or persuasive; and finally the type tonsorial or agglutinative, so called from the shears and the pastepot which are its implements and emblem.

Benjamin N. Cardozo
I am ready to concede that the rule of adherence to precedent, though it ought not to be abandoned, ought to be in some degree relaxed. I think that when a rule, after it has been duly tested by experience, has been found to be inconsistent with the sense of justice or with the social welfare, there should be less hesitation in frank avowal and full abandonment. … That court best serves the law which recognizes that the rules of law which grew up in a remote generation may, in the fullness of experience, be found to serve another generation badly, and which discards the old rule when it finds that another rule of law represents what should be according to the established and settled judgment of society.

Benjamin N. Cardozo
Inaction without more is not tantamount to choice.

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

Benjamin N. Cardozo
If you ask how he is to know when one interest outweighs another, I can only answer that he must get his knowledge just as the legislator gets it, from experience and study and reflection; in brief, from life itself.

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

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

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

Benjamin N. Cardozo