Felix Frankfurter Quotes

63 Sourced Quotes

Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.

Felix Frankfurter
Gratitude is one of the least articulate of the emotions, especially when it is deep. I can express with very limited adequacy the passionate devotion to this land that possesses millions of our people, born, like myself, under other skies, for the privilege that that this county has bestowed in allowing them to partake of its fellowship.

Felix Frankfurter
It is a wise man who said that there is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals.

Felix Frankfurter
Time and experience have forcefully taught that the power to inspect dwelling places, either as a matter of systematic area-by-area search or, as here, to treat a specific problem, is of indispensable importance in the maintenance of community health; a power that would be greatly hobbled by the blanket requirement of the safeguards necessary for a search of evidence of criminal acts.

Felix Frankfurter
Future lawyers should be more aware that law is not a system of abstract logic, but the web of arrangements, rooted in history but also in hopes, for promoting to a maximum the full use of a nation's resources and talents.

Felix Frankfurter
Anybody can decide a question if only a single principle is in controversy.

Felix Frankfurter
After all, advocates, including advocates for States, are like managers of pugilistic and election contestants, in that they have a propensity for claiming everything.

Felix Frankfurter
As a member of this court I am not justified in writing my private notions of policy into the Constitution, no matter how deeply I may cherish them or how mischievous I may deem their disregard.

Felix Frankfurter
A license cannot be revoked because a man is redheaded or because he was divorced, except for a calling, if such there be, for which redheadedness or an unbroken marriage may have some rational bearing. If a State licensing agency lays bare its arbitrary action, or if the State law explicitly allows it to act arbitrarily, that is precisely the kind of State action which the Due Process Clause forbids.

Felix Frankfurter
The ultimate touchstone of constitutionality is the Constitution itself and not what we have said about it.

Felix Frankfurter
Congress is, after all, not a body of laymen unfamiliar with the commonplaces of our law. This legislation was the formulation of the two Judiciary Committees, all of whom are lawyers, and the Congress is predominately a lawyers' body.

Felix Frankfurter
The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards.

Felix Frankfurter
The [Fifteenth] Amendment nullifies sophisticated as well as simple-minded modes of discrimination.

Felix Frankfurter
If one man can be allowed to determine for himself what is law, every man can. That means first chaos, then tyranny. Legal process is an essential part of the democratic process.

Felix Frankfurter
I came into the world a Jew, and although I did not live my life entirely as a Jew, I think it is fitting that I should leave as a Jew. I don't want to … turn my back on a great and noble heritage.

Felix Frankfurter
Litigation is the pursuit of practical ends, not a game of chess.

Felix Frankfurter
A phrase begins life as a literary expression; its felicity leads to its lazy repetition; and repetition soon establishes it as a legal formula, undiscriminatingly used to express different and sometimes contradictory ideas.

Felix Frankfurter
The line must follow some direction of policy, whether rooted in logic or experience. Lines should not be drawn simply for the sake of drawing lines.

Felix Frankfurter
Lincoln's appeal to "the better angels of our nature" failed to avert a fratricidal war. But the compassionate wisdom of Lincoln's first and second inaugurals bequeathed to the Union, cemented with blood, a moral heritage which, when drawn upon in times of stress and strife, is sure to find specific ways and means to surmount difficulties that may appear to be insurmountable.

Felix Frankfurter
To be effective, judicial administration must not be leaden-footed.

Felix Frankfurter
One who belongs to the most vilified and persecuted minority in history is not likely to be insensible to the freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution... But as judges we are neither Jew nor Gentile, neither Catholic nor agnostic.

Felix Frankfurter
If one starts with the assumption that, in the absence of specific Congressional authority, a fixed rule of law precludes contracting officers from providing in a Government contract terms reasonably calculated to assure its performance even though there be no money loss through a particular default, there is no problem. But answers are not obtained by putting the wrong question and thereby begging the real one.

Felix Frankfurter
Decisions of this Court do not have intrinsic authority.

Felix Frankfurter
It is true of opinions as of other compositions that those who are seeped in them, whose ears are sensitive to literary nuances, whose antennae record subtle silences, can gather from their contents meaning beyond the words. All this presupposes, of course, a grasp of the nature of the Supreme Court's functions — the scope and limits of its constitutional authority — and often, as well, familiarity with the record and briefs of a particular case whose opinion record and briefs of a particular case whose opinion is under scrutiny.

Felix Frankfurter
A court which yields to the popular will thereby licenses itself to practice despotism, for there can be no assurance that it will not on another occasion indulge its own will.

Felix Frankfurter
The words of the Constitution … are so unrestricted by their intrinsic meaning or by their history or by tradition or by prior decisions that they leave the individual Justice free, if indeed they do not compel him, to gather meaning not from reading the Constitution but from reading life.

Felix Frankfurter
The Procrustean bed is not a symbol of equality. It is no less inequality to have equality among unequals.

Felix Frankfurter
One is entitled to say without qualification that the correlation between prior judicial experience and fitness for the Supreme Court is zero.

Felix Frankfurter
The mode by which the inevitable is reached is effort.

Felix Frankfurter
Holmes said Emerson had a beautiful voice, and, of course, Holmes had one of the most beautiful voices the Lord ever put into a throat.

Felix Frankfurter