Learned Hand Quotes

76 Sourced Quotes

"I beseech ye in the bowels of Christ, think that ye may be mistaken." I should like to have that written over the portals of every church, every school, and every courthouse, and, may I say, of every legislative body in the United States. I should like to have every court begin, "I beseech ye in the bowels of Christ, think that we may be mistaken."

Learned Hand
What seems fair enough against a squalid huckster of bad liquor may take on a different face, if used by a government determined to suppress political opposition under the guise of sedition.

Learned Hand
This is the most miserable of cases, but we must dispose of it as though it had been presented by actual lawyers.

Learned Hand
Life is made up of a series of judgments on insufficient data, and if we waited to run down all our doubts, it would flow past us.

Learned Hand
Over and over again courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging one's affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everybody does so, rich or poor; and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands: taxes are enforced exactions, not voluntary contributions. To demand more in the name of morals is mere cant.

Learned Hand
We prate of freedom; we are in deadly fear of life, as much of our own American scene betrays.

Learned Hand
The successful competitor, having been urged to compete, must not be turned on when he wins.

Learned Hand
In the end it is worse to suppress dissent than to run the risk of heresy.

Learned Hand
If the prosecution of crime is to be conducted with so little regard for that protection which centuries of English law have given to the individual, we are indeed at the dawn of a new era; and much that we have deemed vital to our liberties, is a delusion.

Learned Hand
Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.

Learned Hand
The public needs the equivalent of Chevrolets as well as Cadillacs.

Learned Hand
Yet the whole structure of the common law is an obvious denial of this theory; it stands as a monument slowly raised, like a coral reef, from the minute accretions of past individuals, of whom each built upon the relics which his predecessors left, and in his turn left a foundation upon which his successors might work.

Learned Hand
What to an outsider will be no more than the vigorous presentation of a conviction, to an employee may be the manifestation of a determination which it is not safe to thwart.

Learned Hand
No plagiarist can excuse the wrong by showing how much of his work he did not pirate.

Learned Hand
Reputation, like a face, is the symbol of its possessor and creator, and another can use it only as a mask.
This was a trademark case

Learned Hand
Any one may so arrange his affairs that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which will best pay the Treasury; there is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes.

Learned Hand