A Quote by Felix Frankfurter

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.

Felix Frankfurter

Quote Topics

Between Cruelty Feelings Fragile Law Limited Medium Mere Reason Tyranny Unbridled Undisciplined Us Will

Quote Author

Felix Frankfurter
American - Judge
November 15, 1882 - February 22, 1965

Nothing shocks our moral feelings so deeply as cruelty does. We can forgive every other crime, but not cruelty. The reason for this is that it is the very opposite of compassion.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Reason cannot save us, nothing can; but reason can mitigate the cruelty of living.

Philip Rieff

Faith and feelings are the warm marrow of evil. Unlike reason, faith and feelings provide no boundary to limit any delusion, any whim. They are virulent poison, giving the numbing illusion of moral sanction to every depravity ever hatched. Faith and feelings are the darkness to reason’s light. Reason is the very substance of truth itself. The glory that is life is wholly embraced through reason. In rejecting it, in rejecting reason, one embraces death.

Terry Goodkind

Reason is the life of the law; nay, the common law itself is nothing else but reason - the law which is perfection of reason.

Edward Coke

Philosophers have done wisely when they have told us to cultivate our reason rather than our feelings, for reason reconciles us to the daily things of existence; our feelings teach us to yearn after the far, the difficult, the unseen.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

The eternal struggle in the law between constancy and change is largely a struggle between history and reason, between past reason and present needs.

Felix Frankfurter

While we are under the tyranny of Priests, it will ever be their interest, to invalidate the law of nature and reason, in order to establish systems incompatible therewith.

Ethan Allen

Reason is the life of the law; nay, the common law itself is nothing else but reasonThe law, which is perfection of reason.

Edward Coke

Let us consider the reason of the case. For nothing is law that is not reason.

John Powell

I do believe I begin to grasp the nature of miracles! For would it be a miracle, if there was any reason for it? Miracles have nothing to do with reason. Miracles contradict reason, they strike clean across mere human deserts, and deliver and save where they will. If they made sense, they would not be miracles.

Ellis Peters

We can choose between the future and the past, between reason and ignorance, between true compassion and mere ideology.

Ron Reagan

They will not criminalise us, rob us of our true identity, steal our individualism, depoliticise us, churn us out as systemised, institutionalised, decent law-abiding robots. Never will they label our liberation struggle as criminal.

Bobby Sands

Where did I get it from? Was it by reason that I attained to the knowledge that I must love my neighbour and not throttle him? They told me so when I was a child, and I gladly believed it, because they told me what was already in my soul. But who discovered it? Not reason! Reason has discovered the struggle for existence and the law that I must throttle all those who hinder the satisfaction of my desires. That is the deduction reason makes. But the law of loving others could not be discovered by reason, because it is unreasonable.

Leo Tolstoy

Instead of that liberty which takes root and growth in the progress of reason, if recovered by mere force or accident, it becomes with an unprepared people a tyranny still of the many, the few, or the one.

Thomas Jefferson

Sometimes the world will tell you that you do what you do for a different reason than your reason. And if you let them convince you that that's your reason, it will become your reason, and you will lose track of yourself.