Felix Frankfurter Quotes

63 Sourced Quotes

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

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
The indispensible judicial requisite is intellectual humility.

Felix Frankfurter
What becomes decisive to a Justice's functioning on the Court in the large area within which his individuality moves is his general attitude toward law, the habits of the mind that he has formed or is capable of unforming, his capacity for detachment, his temperament or training for putting his passion behind his judgment instead of in front of it. The attitudes and qualities which I am groping to characterize are ingredients of what compendiously might be called dominating humility.

Felix Frankfurter
It is not only under Nazi rule that police excesses are inimical to freedom. It is easy to make light of insistence on scrupulous regard for the safeguards of civil liberties when invoked on behalf of the unworthy. It is too easy. History bears testimony that by such disregard are the rights of liberty extinguished, heedlessly at first, then stealthily, and brazenly in the end.

Felix Frankfurter
In this Court dissents have gradually become majority opinions.

Felix Frankfurter
I know of no title that I deem more honorable than that of Professor of the Harvard Law School.

Felix Frankfurter
Appeal must be to an informed, civically militant electorate.

Felix Frankfurter
In the first place, lawyers better remember they are human beings, and a human being who hasn't his periods of doubts and distresses and disappointments must be a cabbage, not a human being. That is number one.

Felix Frankfurter
I do take law very seriously, deeply seriously, because fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalized medium of reason, that's all we have standing between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feeling.

Felix Frankfurter
The most constructive way of resolving conflicts is to avoid them.

Felix Frankfurter
It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have frequently been forged in controversies involving not very nice people.

Felix Frankfurter
Of compelling consideration is the fact that words acquire scope and function from the history of events which they summarize.

Felix Frankfurter
Is that which was deemed to be of so fundamental a nature as to be written into the Constitution to endure for all times to be the sport of shifting winds of doctrine?

Felix Frankfurter
While it is not always profitable to analogize "fact" to "fiction," La Fontaine's fable of the crow, the cheese, and the fox demonstrates that there is a substantial difference between holding a piece of cheese in the beak and putting it in the stomach.

Felix Frankfurter
If nowhere else, in the relation between Church and State, "good fences make good neighbors."

Felix Frankfurter
[It is anomalous] to hold that in order to convict a man the police cannot extract by force what is in his mind, but can extract what is in his stomach.

Felix Frankfurter
Convictions following the admission into evidence of confessions which are involuntary, i. e., the product of coercion, either physical or psychological, cannot stand. This is so not because such confessions are unlikely to be true but because the methods used to extract them offend an underlying principle in the enforcement of our criminal law: that ours is an accusatorial and not an inquisitorial system — a system in which the State must establish guilt by evidence independently and freely secured and may not by coercion prove its charges against an accused out of his own mouth.

Felix Frankfurter
Ambiguity lurks in generality and may thus become an instrument of severity.

Felix Frankfurter
The eternal struggle in the law between constancy and change is largely a struggle between history and reason, between past reason and present needs.

Felix Frankfurter
It would be a narrow conception of jurisprudence to confine the notion of 'laws' to what is found written on the statute books, and to disregard the gloss which life has written upon it.

Felix Frankfurter
Judicial judgment must take deep account... of the day before yesterday in order that yesterday may not paralyze today.

Felix Frankfurter
It must never be forgotten, however, that the Bill of Rights was the child of the Enlightenment. Back of the guarantee of free speech lay faith in the power of an appeal to reason by all the peaceful means for gaining access to the mind. It was in order to avert force and explosions due to restrictions upon rational modes of communication that the guarantee of free speech was given a generous scope. But utterance in a context of violence can lose its significance as an appeal to reason and become part of an instrument of force. Such utterance was not meant to be sheltered by the Constitution.

Felix Frankfurter
One of the prerogatives of American citizenship is the right to criticize public men and measures—and that means not only informed and responsible criticism but the freedom to speak foolishly and without moderation.

Felix Frankfurter
The mark of a truly civilized man is confidence in the strength and security derived from the inquiring mind.

Felix Frankfurter
In a democratic society like ours, relief must come through an aroused popular conscience that sears the conscience of the people's representatives.

Felix Frankfurter
In any event, mere speed is not a test of justice. Deliberate speed is. Deliberate speed takes time. But it is time well spent.

Felix Frankfurter
After all, this is the Nation's ultimate judicial tribunal, not a super-legal-aid bureau.

Felix Frankfurter
National unity is the basis of national security. To deny the legislature the right to select appropriate means for its attainment presents a totally different order of problem from that of the propriety of subordinating the possible ugliness of littered streets to the free expression opinion through handbills.

Felix Frankfurter
Without a free press there can be no free society. That is axiomatic. However, freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of a free society. The scope and nature of the constitutional guarantee of the freedom of the press are to be viewed and applied in that light.

Felix Frankfurter