Felix Frankfurter Short Quotes

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The mode by which the inevitable is reached is effort.

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

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

Felix Frankfurter
The indispensible judicial requisite is intellectual humility.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Felix Frankfurter
It has not been unknown that judges persist in error to avoid giving the appearance of weakness and vacillation.

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

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

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

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
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
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 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