Learned Hand Quotes - Page 2

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• Any one may so arrange his affairs that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which will best pay the Treasury; there is not even a patriotic duty to increase ones taxes.

  Learned Hand

  Patriotic, Advice, Pay

  Helvering v. Gregory (1934)

  7 Copy quote

• All discussion, all debate, all dissidence tends to question and in consequence, to upset existing convictions; that is precisely its purpose and its justification.

  Learned Hand

  Upset, Atheism, Purpose

  Learned Hand (1955). “A fanfare for Prometheus”

  7 Copy quote

• Words are chameleons, which reflect the color of their environment.

  Learned Hand

  Reflection, Color, Environment

  72 Copy quote

• Seldom, if ever, does wisdom come, shall we punish it if it comes late?

  Learned Hand

  Doe, Late, Ifs

  13 Copy quote

• Right knows no boundaries, and justice no frontiers; the brotherhood of man is not a domestic institution.

  Learned Hand

  Men, Brotherhood Of Man, Justice

  Learned Hand (1959). “The Spirit of Liberty: Papers and Addresses”

  8 Copy quote

• The mid-day sun is too much for most eyes; one is dazzled even with its reflection. Be careful that too broad and high an aim does not paralyze your effort and clog your springs of action.

  Learned Hand

  Spring, Eye, Reflection

  Learned Hand (1959). “The Spirit of Liberty: Papers and Addresses”

  20 Copy quote

• The apathy of the modern voter is the confusion of the modern reformer.

  Learned Hand

  Confusion, Voting, Apathy

  Learned Hand (1959). “The Spirit of Liberty: Papers and Addresses”

  4 Copy quote

• The fathers who contrived and passed the Consititution were wise in their generation; as time passes, we come more and more to realize their powers of divination.

  Learned Hand

  Wise, Father, Generations

  Learned Hand (1959). “The Spirit of Liberty: Papers and Addresses”

  8 Copy quote

• Our dangers, as it seems to me, are not from the outrageous but from the conforming; not from those who rarely and under the lurid glare of obloquy upset our moral complaisance, or shock us with unaccustomed conduct, but from those, the mass of us, who take their virtues and their tastes, like their shirts and their furniture, from the limited patterns which the market offers.

  Learned Hand

  Upset, Taste, Furniture

  Learned Hand (1959). “The Spirit of Liberty: Papers and Addresses”

  13 Copy quote

• If a community decides that some conduct is prejudicial to itself, and so decides by numbers sufficient to impose its will upon dissenters, I know of no principle which can stay its hand.

  Learned Hand

  Hands, Numbers, Community

  Learned Hand (1959). “The Spirit of Liberty: Papers and Addresses”

  9 Copy quote

• What seems fair enough against a squalid huckster of bad liquor may take on a different face, if used by a government determined to suppress political opposition under the guise of sedition.

  Learned Hand

  Government, Different Faces, Political

  Learned Hand (1968). “The art and craft of judging: the decisions of Judge Learned Hand”

  7 Copy quote

• No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes scripture; but modern history is not a very satisfactory side-arm in political polemics; it grows less and less so.

  Learned Hand

  Political, Support, Doubt

  Learned Hand (1959). “The Spirit of Liberty: Papers and Addresses”

  18 Copy quote

• The legal relations between the individual and the community which arise out of the production and distribution of property, comprise by far the greater, and more important, part of the law; subtract these and very little content would be left.

  Learned Hand

  Law, Community, Important

  Learned Hand (1959). “The Spirit of Liberty: Papers and Addresses”

  22 Copy quote

• The spirit of liberty is the spirit of him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned ... .

  Learned Hand

  Years, Two, Liberty

  Brainerd Currie, Learned Hand, United States. Supreme Court (1953). “The Supreme Court: an NBC radio discussion”

  7 Copy quote

• If the prosecution of crime is to be conducted with so little regard for that protection which centuries of English law have given to the individual, we are indeed at the dawn of a new era; and much that we have deemed vital to our liberties, is a delusion.

  Learned Hand

  Law, Liberty, Littles

  "United States v. Di Re". Judicial opinion, 1947.

  4 Copy quote

• Heretics have been hated from the beginning of recorded time; they have been ostracized, exiled, tortured, maimed, and butchered; but it has generally proved impossible to smother them; and when it has not, the society that has succeeded has always declined.

  Learned Hand

  Impossible, Hated, Heretic

  Learned Hand (1955). “A fanfare for Prometheus”

  9 Copy quote

• Life in a great society, or for that matter in a small, is a web of tangled relations of all sorts, whose adjustment so that it may be endurable is an extraordinarily troublesome matter.

  Learned Hand

  Tangled, May, Matter

  Learned Hand (1959). “The Spirit of Liberty: Papers and Addresses”

  18 Copy quote

• Would we hold liberty, we must have charity- charity to others, charity to ourselves, crawling up from the moist ovens of a steaming world, still carrying the passional equipment of our ferocious ancestors, emerging from black superstition amid carnage and atrocity to our perilous present.

  Learned Hand

  Black, Liberty, Atrocities

  Learned Hand (1959). “The Spirit of Liberty: Papers and Addresses”

  25 Copy quote

• The use of history is to tell us what we are, for at our birth we are nearly empty vessels and we become what our tradition pours into us.

  Learned Hand

  Empty Vessels, History, Use

  Learned Hand (1959). “The Spirit of Liberty: Papers and Addresses”

  15 Copy quote

• Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.

  Learned Hand

  Love, Freedom, Hate

  "The Spirit of Liberty" (speech), New York, N.Y., 21 May 1944

  21 Copy quote

• How long shall we blunder along without the aid of unpartisan and authoritative scientific assistance in the administration of justice, no one knows; but all fair persons not conventionalized by provincial legal habits of mind ought, I should think, unite to effect some change.

  Learned Hand

  Thinking, Long, Justice

  "Parke, Davis & Co. v. H. K. Mulford Co". Judicial opinion, 1911.

  6 Copy quote

• Convention is like the shell to the chick, a protection till he is strong enough to break it through.

  Learned Hand

  Strong, Shells, Protection

  Learned Hand (1959). “The Spirit of Liberty: Papers and Addresses”

  7 Copy quote

• There is something monstrous in commands couched in invented and unfamiliar language; an alien master is the worst of all. The language of the law must not be foreign to the ears of those who are to obey it.

  Learned Hand

  Law, Ears, Aliens

  Learned Hand (1959). “The Spirit of Liberty: Papers and Addresses”

  7 Copy quote

• We lose the forest for the trees, forgetting, even so far as we think at all, that we are trustees for those who come after us, squandering the patrimony which we have received.

  Learned Hand

  Thinking, Tree, Forests

  Learned Hand (1959). “The Spirit of Liberty: Papers and Addresses”

  7 Copy quote

• The aim of law is the maximum gratification of the nervous system of man.

  Learned Hand

  Men, Law, Nervous

  9 Copy quote

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