Benjamin Cardozo Quotes - Page 2

We seek to find peace of mind in the word, the formula, the ritual. The hope is illusion.

The great tides and currents which engulf the rest of men do not turn aside in their course and pass the judges by.

Inaction without more is not tantamount to choice.

Expediency may tip the scales when arguments are nicely balanced.

It is for ordinary minds, not for psychoanalysts, that our rules of evidence are framed. They have their source very often in considerations of administrative convenience, or practical expediency, and not in rules of logic.

There is in each of us a stream of tendency, whether you choose to call it philosophy or not, which gives coherence and direction to thought and action. Judges cannot escape that current any more than other mortals.

No judicial system could do society's work if each issue had to be decided afresh in every case which raised it.

Not honesty alone, but the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive, is then the standard of behavior.

In our worship of certainty we must distinguish between the sound certainty and the sham, between what is gold and what is tinsel; and then, when certainty is attained, we must remember that it is not the only good; that we can buy it at too high a price; that there is danger in perpetual quiescence as well as in perpetual motion; and that a compromise must be found in a principle of growth.

Prophecy, however honest, is generally a poor substitute for experience.

The great generalities of the constitution have a content and a significance that vary from age to age.

The risk to be percieved defines the duty to be obeyed.

Code is followed by commentary, and commentary by revision, and thus the task is never done.

Due process is a growth too sturdy to succumb to the infection of the least ingredient of error.

With traps and obstacles and hazards confronting us on every hand, only blindness or indifference will fail to turn in all humility, for guidance or for warning, to the study of examples.

I take judge-made law as one of the existing realities of life.

The prophet and the martyr do not see the hooting throng. Their eyes are fixed on the eternities.

Danger invites rescue. ... The wrongdoer may not have foreseen the coming of a deliverer. He is accountable as if he had.

History or custom or social utility or some compelling sense of justice or sometimes perhaps a semi-intuitive apprehension of the pervading spirit of our law must come to the rescue of the anxious judge and tell him where to go.

The difference is no less real because it is of degree.

The validity of a tax depends upon its nature, and not upon its name.

The constant assumption runs throughout the law that the natural and spontaneous evolutions of habit fix the limits of right and wrong.

Opinion has a significance proportioned to the sources that sustain it.