Benjamin N. Cardozo Short Quotes

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Inaction without more is not tantamount to choice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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