Learned Hand Quotes
Justice is the tolerable accommodation of the conflicting interests of society, and I don't believe there is any royal road to attain such accommodation concretely.
We accept the verdict of the past until the need for change cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of inertia and the irksomeness of action.
In america, there are two tax systems: one for the informed and one for the uninformed. Both are legal
The hand that rules the press, the radio, the screen and the far-spread magazine, rules the country.
Life is made up of constant calls to action, and we seldom have time for more than hastily contrived answers.
The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understands the minds of other men and women.
If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: thou shalt not ration justice.
A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few.
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.
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.
The mutual confidence on which all else depends can be maintained only by an open mind and a brave reliance upon free discussion.
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.
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.
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.
Every smallest step of modern industry depends upon a cooperation whose maintenance and regulation is the very stuff of law.
We may win when we lose, if we have done what we can; for by so doing we have made real at least some part of that finished product in whose fabrication we are most concerned: ourselves.
I shall ask no more than that you agree with Dean Inge that even though counting heads is not an ideal way to govern, at least it is better than breaking them.
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.
What to an outsider will be no more than the vigorous presentation of a conviction, to an employee may be the manifestation of a determination which it is not safe to thwart.
No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes the scripture.
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.
Right knows no boundaries, and justice no frontiers; the brotherhood of man is not a domestic institution.
Life is made up of a series of judgments on insufficient data, and if we waited to run down all our doubts, it would flow past us.
You cannot raise the standard against oppression, or leap into the breach to relieve injustice, and still keep an open mind to every disconcerting fact, or an open ear to the cold voice of doubt.
Reputation, like a face, is the symbol of its possessor and creator, and another can use it only as a mask.
It is enough that we set out to mold the motley stuff of life into some form of our own choosing; when we do, the performance is itself the wage.
The spirit of liberty is the spirit of him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned ... .
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.
All discussion, all debate, all dissidence tends to question and in consequence, to upset existing convictions; that is precisely its purpose and its justification.
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.
Convention is like the shell to the chick, a protection till he is strong enough to break it through.
The successful competitor, having been urged to compete, must not be turned upon when he wins.
There is nothing sinister in so arranging one's affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible.
We shall succeed only so far as we continue to undertake “the intolerable labor of thought” — that most distasteful of all our activities.
Those of us who have come to years of discretion and more, must often take to retrospect, and seek to appraise the outcome of our lives.