Felix Frankfurter

“I know of no title that I deem more honorable than that of Professor of the Harvard Law School.”

“Morals are three-quarters manners.”

“I do take law very seriously, deeply seriously, because fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalized medium of reason, that's all we have standing between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feeling.”

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

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

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

“The Amendment nullifies sophisticated as well as simple-minded modes of discrimination.”

“In this Court dissents have gradually become majority opinions.”

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

“To be effective, judicial administration must not be leaden-footed.”

“National unity is the basis of national security. To deny the legislature the right to select appropriate means for its attainment presents a totally different order of problem from that of the propriety of subordinating the possible ugliness of littered streets to the free expression opinion through handbills.”

“Of compelling consideration is the fact that words acquire scope and function from the history of events which they summarize.”

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

“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.”

“No court can make time stand still.”

“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.”

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

“One who belongs to the most vilified and persecuted minority in history is not likely to be insensible to the freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution... But as judges we are neither Jew nor Gentile, neither Catholic nor agnostic.”

“After all, advocates, including advocates for States, are like managers of pugilistic and election contestants, in that they have a propensity for claiming everything.”

“In any event, mere speed is not a test of justice. Deliberate speed is. Deliberate speed takes time. But it is time well spent.”

“The course of decision in this Court has thus far jealously enforced the principle of a free society secured by the prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures. Its safeguards are not to be worn away by a process of devitalizing interpretation.”

“It is not only under Nazi rule that police excesses are inimical to freedom. 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.”

“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.”

“In law also the emphasis makes the song.”

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

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

“Decisions of this Court do not have intrinsic authority.”

“If one starts with the assumption that, in the absence of specific Congressional authority, a fixed rule of law precludes contracting officers from providing in a Government contract terms reasonably calculated to assure its performance even though there be no money loss through a particular default, there is no problem. But answers are not obtained by putting the wrong question and thereby begging the real one.”

“If nowhere else, in the relation between Church and State, "good fences make good neighbors."”

“After all, this is the Nation's ultimate judicial tribunal, nor a super-legal-aid bureau.”

“The indispensible judicial requisite is intellectual humility.”

“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.”

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

“Ambiguity lurks in generality and may thus become an instrument of severity.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“[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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Lincoln's appeal to "the better angels of our nature" failed to avert a fratricidal war. But the compassionate wisdom of Lincoln's first and second inaugurals bequeathed to the Union, cemented with blood, a moral heritage which, when drawn upon in times of stress and strife, is sure to find specific ways and means to surmount difficulties that may appear to be insurmountable.”

“Time and experience have forcefully taught that the power to inspect dwelling places, either as a matter of systematic area-by-area search or, as here, to treat a specific problem, is of indispensable importance in the maintenance of community health; a power that would be greatly hobbled by the blanket requirement of the safeguards necessary for a search of evidence of criminal acts.”

“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.”

“In a democratic society like ours, relief must come through an aroused popular conscience that sears the conscience of the people's representatives.”

“Appeal must be to an informed, civically militant electorate.”

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

“To some lawyers, all facts are created equal.”

“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.”

“Gratitude is one of the least articulate of the emotions, especially when it is deep. I can express with very limited adequacy the passionate devotion to this land that possesses millions of our people, born, like myself, under other skies, for the privilege that that this county has bestowed in allowing them to partake of its fellowship.”

“No judge writes on a wholly clean slate.”

“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.”

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

“What becomes decisive to a Justice's functioning on the Court in the large area within which his individuality moves is his general attitude toward law, the habits of the mind that he has formed or is capable of unforming, his capacity for detachment, his temperament or training for putting his passion behind his judgment instead of in front of it. The attitudes and qualities which I am groping to characterize are ingredients of what compendiously might be called dominating humility.”

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

“The mode by which the inevitable is reached is effort.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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