Felix Frankfurter

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

— Felix Frankfurter

Morals are three-quarters manners.

— Felix Frankfurter

I do take law very seriously, deeply seriously, because fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalized medium of reason, that's all we have standing between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feeling.

— Felix Frankfurter

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

— Felix Frankfurter

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

— Felix Frankfurter

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

— Felix Frankfurter

The Amendment nullifies sophisticated as well as simple-minded modes of discrimination.

— Felix Frankfurter

In this Court dissents have gradually become majority opinions.

— Felix Frankfurter

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

— Felix Frankfurter

To be effective, judicial administration must not be leaden-footed.

— Felix Frankfurter

National unity is the basis of national security. To deny the legislature the right to select appropriate means for its attainment presents a totally different order of problem from that of the propriety of subordinating the possible ugliness of littered streets to the free expression opinion through handbills.

— Felix Frankfurter

Of compelling consideration is the fact that words acquire scope and function from the history of events which they summarize.

— Felix Frankfurter

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

— Felix Frankfurter

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.

— Felix Frankfurter

No court can make time stand still.

— Felix Frankfurter

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.

— Felix Frankfurter

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

— Felix Frankfurter

One who belongs to the most vilified and persecuted minority in history is not likely to be insensible to the freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution... But as judges we are neither Jew nor Gentile, neither Catholic nor agnostic.

— Felix Frankfurter

After all, advocates, including advocates for States, are like managers of pugilistic and election contestants, in that they have a propensity for claiming everything.

— Felix Frankfurter

In any event, mere speed is not a test of justice. Deliberate speed is. Deliberate speed takes time. But it is time well spent.

— Felix Frankfurter

The course of decision in this Court has thus far jealously enforced the principle of a free society secured by the prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures. Its safeguards are not to be worn away by a process of devitalizing interpretation.

— Felix Frankfurter

It is not only under Nazi rule that police excesses are inimical to freedom. 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.

— 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

In law also the emphasis makes the song.

— Felix Frankfurter

The Procrustean bed is not a symbol of equality. It is no less inequality to have equality among unequals.

— Felix Frankfurter

It has not been unknown that judges persist in error to avoid giving the appearance of weakness and vacillation.

— Felix Frankfurter

Decisions of this Court do not have intrinsic authority.

— Felix Frankfurter

If one starts with the assumption that, in the absence of specific Congressional authority, a fixed rule of law precludes contracting officers from providing in a Government contract terms reasonably calculated to assure its performance even though there be no money loss through a particular default, there is no problem. But answers are not obtained by putting the wrong question and thereby begging the real one.

— Felix Frankfurter

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

— Felix Frankfurter

After all, this is the Nation's ultimate judicial tribunal, nor a super-legal-aid bureau.

— Felix Frankfurter

The indispensible judicial requisite is intellectual humility.

— Felix Frankfurter

A court which yields to the popular will thereby licenses itself to practice despotism, for there can be no assurance that it will not on another occasion indulge its own will.

— Felix Frankfurter

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

— Felix Frankfurter

Ambiguity lurks in generality and may thus become an instrument of severity.

— Felix Frankfurter

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.

— Felix Frankfurter

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

— Felix Frankfurter

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

— Felix Frankfurter

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

— 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

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

— Felix Frankfurter

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.

— Felix Frankfurter

While it is not always profitable to analogize "fact" to "fiction," La Fontaine's fable of the crow, the cheese, and the fox demonstrates that there is a substantial difference between holding a piece of cheese in the beak and putting it in the stomach.

— Felix Frankfurter

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.

— Felix Frankfurter

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.

— Felix Frankfurter

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.

— Felix Frankfurter

In a democratic society like ours, relief must come through an aroused popular conscience that sears the conscience of the people's representatives.

— Felix Frankfurter

Appeal must be to an informed, civically militant electorate.

— Felix Frankfurter

The eternal struggle in the law between constancy and change is largely a struggle between history and reason, between past reason and present needs.

— Felix Frankfurter

To some lawyers, all facts are created equal.

— Felix Frankfurter

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.

— Felix Frankfurter

Gratitude is one of the least articulate of the emotions, especially when it is deep. I can express with very limited adequacy the passionate devotion to this land that possesses millions of our people, born, like myself, under other skies, for the privilege that that this county has bestowed in allowing them to partake of its fellowship.

— Felix Frankfurter

No judge writes on a wholly clean slate.

— 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

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

What becomes decisive to a Justice's functioning on the Court in the large area within which his individuality moves is his general attitude toward law, the habits of the mind that he has formed or is capable of unforming, his capacity for detachment, his temperament or training for putting his passion behind his judgment instead of in front of it. The attitudes and qualities which I am groping to characterize are ingredients of what compendiously might be called dominating humility.

— Felix Frankfurter

One is entitled to say without qualification that the correlation between prior judicial experience and fitness for the Supreme Court is zero.

— Felix Frankfurter

The mode by which the inevitable is reached is effort.

— 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

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

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

— 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

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

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

— Felix Frankfurter