Benjamin Cardozo Quotes

Every human being of adult years and sound mind has a legal right to determine what shall be done with his own body.

Rest and motion, unrelieved and unchecked, are equally destructive.

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.

No judicial system could do society's work if each issue had to be decided afresh in every case which raised it.

Justice, though due to the accused, is due the accuser also. The concept of fairness cannot be strained till it is narrowed to a filament. We are to keep our balance true.

Membership in the bar is a privilege burdened with conditions.

Fraud includes the pretense of knowledge when knowledge there is none.

Not honesty alone, but the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive, is then the standard of behavior.

The heroic hours of life do not announce their presence by drum and trumpet.

The final cause of law is the welfare of society.

The judge is not the knight-errant, roaming at will in pursuit of his own ideal of beauty or of goodness.

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.

It is for ordinary minds, not for psychoanalysts, that our rules of evidence are framed. They have their source very often in considerations of administrative convenience, or practical expediency, and not in rules of logic.

The prophet and the martyr do not see the hooting throng. Their eyes are fixed on the eternities.

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.

Law never is, but is always about to be.

I take judge-made law as one of the existing realities of life.

Opinion has a significance proportioned to the sources that sustain it.

We seek to find peace of mind in the word, the formula, the ritual. The hope is illusion.

History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.

The risk to be percieved defines the duty to be obeyed.

The validity of a tax depends upon its nature, and not upon its name.

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.

The constant assumption runs throughout the law that the natural and spontaneous evolutions of habit fix the limits of right and wrong.

Method is much, technique is much, but inspiration is even more.

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.

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.

Prophecy, however honest, is generally a poor substitute for experience.

Justice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances.

Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.

There are vogues and fashions in jurisprudence as in literature and art and dress.

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.