Benjamin Cardozo Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“Justice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances.”
-- Benjamin Cardozo -
“Method is much, technique is much, but inspiration is even more.”
-- Benjamin Cardozo -
“In the end the great truth will have been learned that the quest is greater than what is sought, the effort finer that the prize (or rather, that the effort is the prize), the victory cheap and hollow were it not for the rigor of the game.”
-- Benjamin Cardozo -
“History or custom or social utility or some compelling sense of justice or sometimes perhaps a semi-intuitive apprehension of the pervading spirit of our law must come to the rescue of the anxious judge and tell him where to go.”
-- Benjamin Cardozo -
“The judge is not the knight-errant, roaming at will in pursuit of his own ideal of beauty or of goodness.”
-- Benjamin Cardozo -
“The constant assumption runs throughout the law that the natural and spontaneous evolutions of habit fix the limits of right and wrong.”
-- Benjamin Cardozo -
“There are vogues and fashions in jurisprudence as in literature and art and dress.”
-- Benjamin Cardozo -
“There is in each of us a stream of tendency, whether you choose to call it philosophy or not, which gives coherence and direction to thought and action. Judges cannot escape that current any more than other mortals.”
-- Benjamin Cardozo -
“History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.”
-- Benjamin Cardozo -
“The validity of a tax depends upon its nature, and not upon its name.”
-- Benjamin Cardozo -
“Opinion has a significance proportioned to the sources that sustain it.”
-- Benjamin Cardozo -
“The risk to be percieved defines the duty to be obeyed.”
-- Benjamin Cardozo -
“Prophecy, however honest, is generally a poor substitute for experience.”
-- Benjamin Cardozo -
“Law never is, but is always about to be.”
-- Benjamin Cardozo -
“As I search the archives of my memory I seem to discern six types or methods [of judicial writing] which divide themselves from one another with measurable distinctness. There is the type magisterial or imperative; the type laconic or sententious; the type conversational or homely; the type refined or artificial, smelling of the lamp, verging at times upon preciosity or euphuism; the demonstrative or persuasive; and finally the type tonsorial or agglutinative, so called from the shears and the pastepot which are its implements and emblem.”
-- Benjamin Cardozo -
“The final cause of law is the welfare of society.”
-- Benjamin Cardozo -
“The heroic hours of life do not announce their presence by drum and trumpet.”
-- Benjamin Cardozo -
“Not honesty alone, but the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive, is then the standard of behavior.”
-- Benjamin Cardozo -
“Fraud includes the pretense of knowledge when knowledge there is none.”
-- Benjamin Cardozo -
“The prophet and the martyr do not see the hooting throng. Their eyes are fixed on the eternities.”
-- Benjamin Cardozo -
“The great ideals of liberty and equality are preserved against the assaults of opportunism, the expediency of the passing hour, the erosion of small encroachments, the scorn and derision of those who have no patience with general principles.”
-- Benjamin Cardozo -
“The Constitution was framed upon the theory that the peoples of the several states must sink or swim together, and that in the long run prosperity and salvation are in union and not division.”
-- Benjamin Cardozo -
“More truly characteristic of dissent is a dignity, an elevation, of mood and thought and phrase. Deep conviction and warm feeling are saying their last say with knowledge that the cause is lost. The voice of the majority may be that of force triumphant, content with the plaudits of the hour, and recking little of the morrow. The dissenter speaks to the future, and his voice is pitched to a key that will carry through the years.”
-- Benjamin Cardozo -
“I take judge-made law as one of the existing realities of life.”
-- Benjamin Cardozo -
“What has once been settled by a precedent will not be unsettled overnight, for certainty and uniformity are gains not lightly sacrificed. Above all is this true when honest men have shaped their conduct on the faith of the pronouncement.”
-- Benjamin Cardozo -
“Danger invites rescue. ... The wrongdoer may not have foreseen the coming of a deliverer. He is accountable as if he had.”
-- Benjamin Cardozo -
“Consequences cannot alter statutes, but may help to fix their meaning.”
-- Benjamin Cardozo -
“The difference is no less real because it is of degree.”
-- Benjamin Cardozo -
“In truth, I am nothing but a plodding mediocrity — please observe, a plodding mediocrity — for a mere mediocrity does not go very far, but a plodding one gets quite a distance. There is joy in that success, and a distinction can come from courage, fidelity and industry.”
-- Benjamin Cardozo -
“The heroic hours of life do not announce their presence by drum and trumpet, challenging us to be true to ourselves by appeals to the martial spirit that keeps the blood at heat. Some little, unassuming, unobtrusive choice presents itself before us slyly and craftily, glib and insinuating, in the modest garb of innocence. . . . Then it is that you will be summoned to show the courage of adventurous youth.”
-- Benjamin Cardozo