It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have been forged in controversies involving not very nice people.
Felix FrankfurterOne is entitled to say without qualification that the correlation between prior judicial experience and fitness for the Supreme Court is zero.
Felix FrankfurterAll 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.
Felix FrankfurterIt 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.
Felix Frankfurter