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 More Quotes by Felix Frankfurter More Quotes From Felix Frankfurter The Procrustean bed is not a symbol of equality. It is no less inequality to have equality among unequals. Felix Frankfurter symbols inequality bed The ultimate foundation of a free society is the binding tie of cohesive sentiment. Felix Frankfurter liberty freedom ties Democracy is always a beckoning goal, not a safe harbor. For freedom is an unremitting endeavor, never a final achievement. Felix Frankfurter achievement democracy goal No judge writes on a wholly clean slate. Felix Frankfurter clean judging writing We recognize that stare decisis embodies an important social policy that represents an element of continuity in law and is rooted in the psychological need to satisfy reasonable expectations. Felix Frankfurter psychological important expectations 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 propensity election states 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 government real loss The indispensible judicial requisite is intellectual humility. Felix Frankfurter intellectual-humility intellectual humility 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 views law exercise We forget that the most successful statesmen have been professionals. Lincoln was a professional politician. Felix Frankfurter professionalism successful forget If nowhere else, in the relation between Church and State, "good fences make good neighbors." Felix Frankfurter neighbor church fence 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 political nice people A license cannot be revoked because a man is red-headed or because he was divorced, except for a calling, if such there be, for which red-headedness or an unbroken marriage may have some rational bearing. If a State licensing agency lays bare its arbitrary action, or if the State law explicitly allows it to act arbitrarily, that is precisely the kind of State action which the Due Process Clause forbids. Felix Frankfurter agency law men Convictions following the admission into evidence of confessions which are involuntary, i.e., the product of coercion, either physical or psychological, cannot stand. This is so not because such confessions are unlikely to be true but because the methods used to extract them offend an underlying principle in the enforcement of our criminal law: that 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 charges against an accused out of his own mouth. Felix Frankfurter guilt principles law 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 yield practice justice Morals are three-quarters manners. Felix Frankfurter moral three manners Is that which was deemed to be of so fundamental a nature as to be written into the Constitution to endure for all times to be the sport of shifting winds of doctrine? Felix Frankfurter doctrine wind sports 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 minorities catholic judging It would be a narrow conception of jurisprudence to confine the notion of "laws" to what is found written on the statute books, and to disregard the gloss which life has written upon it. Felix Frankfurter would-be law book Anybody who is any good is different from anybody else. Felix Frankfurter individuality different