Felix Frankfurter - History Quotes

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

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