Felix Frankfurter Quotes

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

Appeal must be to an informed, civically militant electorate.

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

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

Gratitude is one of the least articulate of the emotions, especially when it is deep.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

There can be no security where there is fear.

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

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

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

Freedom of expression is the well-spring of our civilization... The history of civilization is in considerable measure the displacement of error which once held sway as official truth by beliefs which in turn have yielded to other truths. Therefore the liberty of man to search for truth ought not to be fettered, no matter what orthodoxies he may challenge.

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

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.

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

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

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 State insists that, by thus quarantining the general reading public against books not too rugged for grown men and women in order to shield juvenile innocence, it is exercising its power to promote the general welfare. Surely this is to burn the house to roast the pig...The incidence of this enactment is to reduce the adult population of Michigan to reading only what is fit for children.

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.

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.

The dynamo of our economic system is self-interest which may range from mere petty greed to admirable types of self-expression.

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.

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.

Answers are not obtained by putting the wrong question and thereby begging the real one.

Anybody who is any good is different from anybody else.

We forget that the most successful statesmen have been professionals. Lincoln was a professional politician.

I don’t like a man to be too efficient. He’s likely to be not human enough.

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

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

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.

It simply is not true that war never settles anything.

To some lawyers, all facts are created equal.

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.

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

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

Thirty resolute men in your House of Commons could save the world.

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.

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 would be a stultification of the responsibility which the course of constitutional history has cast upon this Court 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 ultimate foundation of a free society is the binding tie of cohesive sentiment.

Ours is an accusatorial, and not an inquisitorial, system - a system in which the State must establish guilt by evidence independently and freely secured, and may not, by coercion, prove its charge against an accused out of his own mouth.

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.

No judge writes on a wholly clean slate.

Fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalised medium of reason, that's all we have between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feelings.