Best 90 quotes of Learned Hand on MyQuotes

Learned Hand

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    Learned Hand

    A government of laws without men is as visionary as a government of men without laws.

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    Learned Hand

    All discussion, all debate, all dissidence tends to question and in consequence, to upset existing convictions; that is precisely its purpose and its justification.

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    Learned Hand

    Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes. Over and over again the Courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everyone does it, rich and poor alike and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands.

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    Learned Hand

    Any one may so arrange his affairs that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which will best pay the Treasury; there is not even a patriotic duty to increase ones taxes.

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    Learned Hand

    A self-made man may prefer a self-made name.

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    Learned Hand

    A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few.

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    Learned Hand

    As soon as we cease to pry about at random, we shall come to rely upon accredited bodies of authoritative dogma; and as soon as we come to rely upon accredited bodies of authoritative dogma, not only are the days of our liberty over, but we have lost the password that has hitherto opened to us the gates of success as well.

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    Learned Hand

    Bipartisan democracy presupposes the individual, whose welfare is identical with that of the community in which he lives, the absence of coherent social classes, a basic uniformity of interest throughout.

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    Learned Hand

    Conservative political opinion in America cleaves to the tradition of the judge as passive interpreter, believing that his absolute loyalty to authoritative law is the price of his immunity from political pressure and of the security of his tenure.

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    Learned Hand

    Convention is like the shell to the chick, a protection till he is strong enough to break it through.

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    Learned Hand

    Each one of us must in the end choose for himself how far he would like to leave our collective fate to the wayward vagaries of popular assemblies For myself it would be most irksome to be ruled by a bevy of Platonic Guardians, even if I knew how to choose them, which I assuredly do not I should miss the stimulus of living in a society where I have, at least theoretically, some part in the direction of public affairs.

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    Learned Hand

    Every smallest step of modern industry depends upon a cooperation whose maintenance and regulation is the very stuff of law.

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    Learned Hand

    For myself it would be most irksome to be ruled by a bevy of Platonic Guardians, even if I knew how to choose them, which I assuredly do not.

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    Learned Hand

    For, when all is said, as my friend George Rublee likes to put it, the only success is to be a success as a person; and it is still not too late for that.

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    Learned Hand

    Here I am an old man in a long nightgown making muffled noises at people who may be no worse than I am.

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    Learned Hand

    Heretics have been hated from the beginning of recorded time; they have been ostracized, exiled, tortured, maimed, and butchered; but it has generally proved impossible to smother them; and when it has not, the society that has succeeded has always declined.

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    Learned Hand

    How long shall we blunder along without the aid of unpartisan and authoritative scientific assistance in the administration of justice, no one knows; but all fair persons not conventionalized by provincial legal habits of mind ought, I should think, unite to effect some change.

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    Learned Hand

    "I beseech ye in the bowels of Christ, think that ye may be mistaken." I should like to have that written over the portals of every church, every school, and every courthouse, and, may I say, of every legislative body in the United States. I should like to have every court begin, "I beseech ye in the bowels of Christ, think that we may be mistaken.

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    Learned Hand

    If a community decides that some conduct is prejudicial to itself, and so decides by numbers sufficient to impose its will upon dissenters, I know of no principle which can stay its hand.

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    Learned Hand

    If the prosecution of crime is to be conducted with so little regard for that protection which centuries of English law have given to the individual, we are indeed at the dawn of a new era; and much that we have deemed vital to our liberties, is a delusion.

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    Learned Hand

    If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: thou shalt not ration justice.

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    Learned Hand

    I had rather take my chance that some traitors will escape detection than spread abroad a spirit of general suspicion and distrust, which accepts rumor and gossip in place of undismayed and unintimidated inquiry.

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    Learned Hand

    In america, there are two tax systems: one for the informed and one for the uninformed. Both are legal

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    Learned Hand

    In the end it is worse to suppress dissent than to run the risk of heresy.

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    Learned Hand

    I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon law and upon courts. These are false hopes, believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no courts to save it.

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    Learned Hand

    I shall ask no more than that you agree with Dean Inge that even though counting heads is not an ideal way to govern, at least it is better than breaking them.

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    Learned Hand

    It is enough that we set out to mold the motley stuff of life into some form of our own choosing; when we do, the performance is itself the wage.

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    Learned Hand

    It is often hard to secure unanimity about the borders of legislative power, but that is much easier than to decide how far a particular adjustment diverges from what the judges deem tolerable. On such issues experience has over and over again shown the difficulty of securing unanimity. This is disastrous because disunity cancels the impact of monolithic solidarity on which the authority of a bench of judges so largely depends.

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    Learned Hand

    It is still in the lap of the gods whether a society can succeed which is based on "civil liberties and human rights" conceived as I have tried to describe them; but of one thing at least we may be sure: the alternatives that have so far appeared have been immeasurably worse.

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    Learned Hand

    It was not the violence of our enemies [in World War I] that would undo us, I thought, but our own spiritual weakness, the shallowness of our convictions.

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    Learned Hand

    Justice is the tolerable accommodation of the conflicting interests of society, and I don't believe there is any royal road to attain such accommodation concretely.

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    Learned Hand

    Liberty is so much latitude as the powerful choose to accord to the weak.

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    Learned Hand

    Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.

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    Learned Hand

    Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it ... The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias.

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    Learned Hand

    Life in a great society, or for that matter in a small, is a web of tangled relations of all sorts, whose adjustment so that it may be endurable is an extraordinarily troublesome matter.

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    Learned Hand

    Life is made up of a series of judgments on insufficient data, and if we waited to run down all our doubts, it would flow past us.

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    Learned Hand

    Life is made up of constant calls to action, and we seldom have time for more than hastily contrived answers.

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    Learned Hand

    Life is not a thing of knowing only--nay, mere knowledge has properly no place at all save as it becomes the handmaiden of feeling and emotions.

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    Learned Hand

    No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes scripture; but modern history is not a very satisfactory side-arm in political polemics; it grows less and less so.

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    Learned Hand

    No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes the scripture.

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    Learned Hand

    Our common law is the stock instance of a combination of custom and its successive adaptations.

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    Learned Hand

    Our dangers, as it seems to me, are not from the outrageous but from the conforming; not from those who rarely and under the lurid glare of obloquy upset our moral complaisance, or shock us with unaccustomed conduct, but from those, the mass of us, who take their virtues and their tastes, like their shirts and their furniture, from the limited patterns which the market offers.

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    Learned Hand

    Political agitation, by the passions it arouses or the convictions it engenders, may in fact stimulate men to the violation of the law. Detestation of existing policies is easily transformed into forcible resistance of the authority which puts them in execution, and it would be folly to disregard the causal relation between the two. Yet to assimilate agitation, legitimate as such, with direct incitement to violent resistance, is to disregard the tolerance of all methods of political agitation which in normal times is a safeguard of free government.

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    Learned Hand

    Reputation, like a face, is the symbol of its possessor and creator, and another can use it only as a mask.

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    Learned Hand

    Right knows no boundaries, and justice no frontiers; the brotherhood of man is not a domestic institution.

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    Learned Hand

    Skepticism is my only gospel, but I don't want to make a dogma out of it.

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    Learned Hand

    That community is already in the process of dissolution where each man begins to eye his neighbor as a possible enemy, where non-conformity with the accepted creed, political as well as religious, is a mark of disaffection; where denunciation, without specification or backing, takes the place of evidence; where orthodoxy chokes freedom of dissent; where faith in the eventual supremacy of reason has become so timid that we dare not enter our convictions in the open lists, to win or lose.

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    Learned Hand

    The aim of law is the maximum gratification of the nervous system of man.

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    Learned Hand

    The apathy of the modern voter is the confusion of the modern reformer.

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    Learned Hand

    The art of publicity is a black art.