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

Felix Frankfurter

observance liberty historical

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

Felix Frankfurter

freedom real exercise

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.

Felix Frankfurter

selfish freedom men

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.

Felix Frankfurter

patriotic 4th-of-july 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

political light rights

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

Felix Frankfurter

freedom-of-speech enlightenment people

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

Felix Frankfurter

equality wise men

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

understanding tools law

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

disappointment doubt numbers

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

Felix Frankfurter

rejects late wisdom

To some lawyers, all facts are created equal.

Felix Frankfurter

law feet facts

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

Felix Frankfurter

libertarian-party constitution liberty

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

Felix Frankfurter

office important land

There can be no security where there is fear.

Felix Frankfurter

security fear

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

Felix Frankfurter

liberty freedom mean

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.

Felix Frankfurter

law reason feelings

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

Felix Frankfurter

mother thank-you sympathy

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

decision reading justice

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

body law two

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.

Felix Frankfurter

freedom spring men