Learned Hand Short Quotes

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Words are chameleons, which reflect the color of their environment.

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

Learned Hand
The apathy of the modern voter is the confusion of the modern reformer.

Learned Hand
Liberty is so much latitude as the powerful choose to accord to the weak.

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

Learned Hand
The language of the law must not be foreign to the ears of those who are to obey it.

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

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

Learned Hand
If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: Thou shalt not ration justice.

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

Learned Hand
Tyranny is tyranny, no matter what its form; the free man will resist it if his courage serves.

Learned Hand
Our common law is the stock instance of a combination of custom and its successive adaptations.

Learned Hand
Right knows no boundaries and justice no frontiers; the brotherhood of man is not a domestic institution.

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
Life is made up of constant calls to action, and we seldom have time for more than hastily contrived answers.

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
Like John Stuart Mill, he would often begin by stating the other side better than its advocate had stated it himself.

Learned Hand
Today in America vast concourses of youth are flocking to our colleges, eager for something, just what they do not know.

Learned Hand
A wise man once said, "Convention is like the shell to the chick, a protection till he is strong enough to break it through."

Learned Hand
The mutual confidence on which all else depends can be maintained only by an open mind and a brave reliance upon free discussion.

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
Those of us who have come to years of discretion and more, must often take to retrospect, and seek to appraise the outcome of our lives.

Learned Hand
A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few.

Learned Hand
The use of history is to tell us what we are, for at our birth we are nearly empty vessels and we become what our tradition pours into us.

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For myself it would be most irksome to be ruled by a bevy of Platonic Guardians, even if I knew how to choose them, which I assuredly do not.

Learned Hand
There is no fury like that against one who, we fear, may succeed in making us disloyal to beliefs we hold with passion, but have not really won.

Learned Hand
Life is not a thing of knowing only — nay, mere knowledge has properly no place at all save as it becomes the handmaiden of feeling and emotion.

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I shall ask no more than that you agree with Dean Inge that even though counting heads is not an ideal way to govern, at least it is better than breaking them.

Learned Hand
All discussion, all debate, all dissidence tends to question and in consequence, to upset existing convictions; that is precisely its purpose and its justification.

Learned Hand
The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understands the minds of other men and women.

Learned Hand