Top 92 Quotes & Sayings by Felix Frankfurter

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

It simply is not true that war never settles anything.

It must take account of what it decrees for today in order that today may not paralyze tomorrow.

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.

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

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.

It is anomalous 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.

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

There can be no security where there is fear.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The mode by which the inevitable is reached is effort.

To some lawyers, all facts are created equal.

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.

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

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

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

As a member of this court I am not justified in writing my private notions of policy into the Constitution, no matter how deeply I may cherish them or how mischievous I may deem their disregard.

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

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

The Procrustean bed is not a symbol of equality. It is no less inequality to have equality among unequals.

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.

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.

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.

The line must follow some direction of policy, whether rooted in logic or experience. Lines should not be drawn simply for the sake of drawing lines.

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

There is torture of mind as well as body; the will is as much affected by fear as by force. And there comes a point where this Court should not be ignorant as judges of what we know as men.

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.

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

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

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

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

A phrase begins life as a literary expression; its felicity leads to its lazy repetition, and repetition soon establishes it as a legal formula, undiscriminatingly used to express different and sometimes contradictory ideas.

No office in the land is more important than that of being a citizen.

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.

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

Anybody who is any good is different from anybody else.

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.

Morals are three-quarters manners.

Government is itself an art, one of the subtlest of the arts. It is neither business, nor technology, nor applied science. It is the art of making men live together in peace and with reasonable happiness.

No judge writes on a wholly clean slate.

In the first place, lawyers better remember they are human beings, and a human being who hasn't his periods of doubts and distresses and disappointments must be a cabbage, not a human being. That is number one.

A court which yields to the popular will thereby licenses itself to practice despotism, for there can be no assurance that it will not, on another occasion, indulge its own will.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Liberty of thought soon shrivels without freedom of expression. Nor can truth be pursued in an atmosphere hostile to the endeavor or under dangers which are hazarded only by heroes.

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.

The words of the Constitution... are so unrestricted by their intrinsic meaning or by their history or by tradition or by prior decisions that they leave the individual Justice free, if indeed they do not compel him, to gather meaning not from reading the Constitution but from reading life.

For the highest exercise of judicial duty is to subordinate one's personal pulls and one's private views to the law of which we are all guaradians - those impersonal convictions that made a society a civilized community, and not the victims of personal rule.

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 indispensible judicial requisite is intellectual humility.

It has not been unknown that judges persist in error to avoid giving the appearance of weakness and vacillation.