Felix Frankfurter Quotes

Ultimately there can be no freedom for self unless it is vouchsafed for others; there can be no security where there is fear, and a democratic society presupposes confidence and candor in the relations of men with one another and eager collaboration for the larger ends of life instead of the pursuit of petty, selfish or vainglorious aims.

Thirty resolute men in your House of Commons could save the world.

There can be no security where there is fear.

It is hostile to a democratic system to involve the judiciary in the politics of the people.

Anybody who is any good is different from anybody else.

We recognize that stare decisis embodies an important social policy that represents an element of continuity in law and is rooted in the psychological need to satisfy reasonable expectations.

The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day. It does come, however slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority.

We forget that the most successful statesmen have been professionals. Lincoln was a professional politician.

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

The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards.

All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them.

There is no inevitability in history except as men make it.

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

Ours is an accusatorial, and not an inquisitorial, system - a system in which the State must establish guilt by evidence independently and freely secured, and may not, by coercion, prove its charge against an accused out of his own mouth.

It would be a stultification of the responsibility which the course of constitutional history has cast upon this Court to hold that in order to convict a man the police cannot extract by force what is in his mind, but can extract what is in his stomach.

Gratitude is one of the least articulate of the emotions, especially when it is deep.

Appeal must be to an informed, civically militant electorate.

It is easy to make light of insistence on scrupulous regard for the safeguards of civil liberties when invoked on behalf of the unworthy. It is too easy. History bears testimony that by such disregard are the rights of liberty extinguished, heedlessly at first, then stealthily, and brazenly in the end.

I don’t like a man to be too efficient. He’s likely to be not human enough.

To some lawyers, all facts are created equal.

It simply is not true that war never settles anything.

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

Congress is, after all, not a body of laymen unfamiliar with the commonplaces of our law. This legislation was the formulation of the two Judiciary Committees, all of whom are lawyers, and the Congress is predominately a lawyers' body.

It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have been forged in controversies involving not very nice people.

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

We have enjoyed so much freedom for so long that we are perhaps in danger of forgetting how much blood it cost to establish the Bill of Rights.

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

The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes.

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

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

The State insists that, by thus quarantining the general reading public against books not too rugged for grown men and women in order to shield juvenile innocence, it is exercising its power to promote the general welfare. Surely this is to burn the house to roast the pig...The incidence of this enactment is to reduce the adult population of Michigan to reading only what is fit for children.

Answers are not obtained by putting the wrong question and thereby begging the real one.

It is important not to give the appearance of a predisposed mind. And it is more important not to let the mind become predisposed.

Freedom of expression is the well-spring of our civilization... The history of civilization is in considerable measure the displacement of error which once held sway as official truth by beliefs which in turn have yielded to other truths. Therefore the liberty of man to search for truth ought not to be fettered, no matter what orthodoxies he may challenge.

Democracy is always a beckoning goal, not a safe harbor. For freedom is an unremitting endeavor, never a final achievement.

Future lawyers should be more aware that law is not a system of abstract logic, but the web of arrangements, rooted in history but also in hopes, for promoting to a maximum the full use of a nation's resources and talents.

Without a free press there can be no free society. That is axiomatic. However, freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of a free society. The scope and nature of the constitutional guarantee of the freedom of the press are to be viewed and applied in that light.

If one man can be allowed to determine for himself what is law, every man can. That means first chaos, then tyranny. Legal process is an essential part of the democratic process.

The ultimate foundation of a free society is the binding tie of cohesive sentiment.

I came into the world a Jew, and although I did not live my life entirely as a Jew, I think it is fitting that I should leave as a Jew. I don't want to ... turn my back on a great and noble heritage.

Freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of a free society.

Fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalised medium of reason, that's all we have between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feelings.

While it is not always profitable to analogize "fact" to "fiction," La Fontaine's fable of the crow, the cheese, and the fox demonstrates that there is a substantial difference between holding a piece of cheese in the beak and putting it in the stomach.

Old age and sickness bring out the essential characteristics of a man.

Certainly the affirmative pursuit of one's convictions about the ultimate mystery of the universe and man's relation to it is placed beyond the reach of law. Government may not interfere with organized or individual expressions of belief or disbelief. Propagation of belief - or even of disbelief - in the supernatural is protected, whether in church or chapel, mosque or synagogue, tabernacle or meeting-house.

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

Freedom of speech and of the press are essential to the enlightenment of a free people and in restraining those who wield power.

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