Felix Frankfurter quotes

It is a wise man who said that there is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals. (Felix Frankfurter)
Litigation is the pursuit of practical ends, not a game of chess.
Felix Frankfurter
It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have been forged in controversies involving not very nice people.
Felix Frankfurter
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.
Felix Frankfurter
Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.
Felix Frankfurter
The ultimate touchstone of constitutionality is the Constitution itself and not what we have said about it.
Felix Frankfurter
The mark of a truly civilized man is confidence in the strength and security derived from the inquiring mind.
Felix Frankfurter
Gratitude is one of the least articulate of the emotions, especially when it is deep.
Felix Frankfurter
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.
Felix Frankfurter
Judicial judgment must take deep account of the day before yesterday in order that yesterday may not paralyze today.
Felix Frankfurter
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. (Felix Frankfurter)
The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards.
Felix Frankfurter
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.
Felix Frankfurter
Answers are not obtained by putting the wrong question and thereby begging the real one.
Felix Frankfurter
The mode by which the inevitable is reached is effort.
Felix Frankfurter
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.
Felix Frankfurter
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.
Felix Frankfurter
There can be no security where there is fear.
Felix Frankfurter
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.
Felix Frankfurter
The most constructive way of resolving conflicts is to avoid them.
Felix Frankfurter
I know of no title that I deem more honorable than that of Professor of the Harvard Law School. (Felix Frankfurter)
No court can make time stand still.
Felix Frankfurter
It simply is not true that war never settles anything.
Felix Frankfurter
No judge writes on a wholly clean slate.
Felix Frankfurter
Morals are three-quarters manners.
Felix Frankfurter