Felix Frankfurter Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Anybody who is any good is different from anybody else.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The indispensible judicial requisite is intellectual humility.

It simply is not true that war never settles anything.

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.

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.

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

There can be no security where there is fear.