Top 15 Benjamin N. Cardozo Quotes

In truth, I am nothing but a plodding mediocrity — please observe, a plodding mediocrity — for a mere mediocrity does not go very far, but a plodding one gets quite a distance. There is joy in that success, and a distinction can come from courage, fidelity and industry.

Three great mysteries there are in the lives of mortal beings: the mystery of birth at the beginning; the mystery of death at the end; and, greater than either, the mystery of love. Everything that is most precious in life is a form of love. Art is a form of love, if it be noble; labor is a form of love, if it be worthy; thought is a form of love, if it be inspired.

Ο δικαστής, ακόμη και όταν είναι ελεύθερος, δεν είναι τελείως ελεύθερος. Δεν μπορεί να καινοτομεί όπως και όταν του αρέσει. Δεν είναι ένας περιπλανώμενος ιππότης που αναζητεί το δικό του ιδανικό της ομορφιάς και της καλοσύνης. Είναι υποχρεωμένος να αντλεί την έμπνευσή του μέσα απο τις καθιερωμένες αρχές. Δεν πρέπει να ενδίδει σε σπασμωδικά συναισθήματα, σε μια αόριστη διάθεση ευσπλαχνίας. Είναι υποχρεωμένος να ασκεί μια διακριτική εξουσία, προσδιορισμένη από την παράδοση, μεθοδευμένη από την αναλογία, πειθαρχημένη από το σύστημα και υποκείμενη στην πρωταρχική ανάγκη της τάξης στην κοινωνική ζωή

You will study the wisdom of the past, for in a wilderness of conflicting counsels, a trail has there been blazed. You will study the life of mankind, for this is the life you must order, and, to order with wisdom, must know. You will study the precepts of justice, for these are the truths that through you shall come to their hour of triumph. Here is the high emprise, the fine endeavor, the splendid possibility of achievement, to which I summon you and bid you welcome.

Bills of rights give assurance to the individual of the preservation of his liberty. They do not define the liberty they promise.

They do things better with logarithms.

What has once been settled by a precedent will not be unsettled overnight, for certainty and uniformity are gains not lightly sacrificed. Above all is this true when honest men have shaped their conduct on the faith of the pronouncement.

Liberty in the most literal sense is the negation of law for law is restraint, and the absence of restraint is anarchy. On the other hand, anarchy by destroying restraint would leave liberty the exclusive possession of the strong or the unscrupulous.

A judge is to give effect in general not to his own scale of values, but to the scale of values revealed to him in his readings of the social mind. … Objective tests may fail him, or may be confused as to bewilder. He must then look within himself.

It comes down to this. There are certain forms of conduct which at any given place and epoch are commonly accepted under the combined influence of reason, practice and tradition, as moral or immoral. … Law accepts as the pattern of its justice the morality of the community whose conduct it assumes to regulate. In saying this, we are not to blind ourselves to the truth that uncertainty is far from banished. Morality is not merely different in different communities. Its level is not the same for all the component groups within the same community. A choice must still be made between one group standard and another. We have still to face the problem, at which one of these levels does the social pressure become strong enough to convert the moral norm into a jural one? All that we can say is that the line will be higher than the lowest level of moral principle and practice, and lower than the highest. The law will not hold the crowd to the morality of saints and seers. It will follow, or strive to follow, the principle and practice of the men and women of the community whom the social mind would rank as intelligent and virtuous.

Our course of advance ... is neither a straight line nor a curve. It is a series of dots and dashes. Progress comes per saltum, by successive compromises between extremes, compromises often … between "positivism and idealism". The notion that a jurist can dispense with any consideration as to what the law ought to be arises from the fiction that the law is a complete and closed system, and that judges and jurists are mere automata to record its will or phonographs to pronounce its provisions.

The state in commissioning its judges has commanded them to judge, but neither in constitution nor in statute has it formulated a code to define the manner of their judging. The pressure of society invests new forms of conduct in the minds of the multitude with the sanction of moral obligation, and the same pressure working upon the mind of the judge invests them finally through his action with the sanction of the law.

The reconciliation of the irreconcilable, the merger of antitheses, the synthesis of opposites, these are the great problems of the law... We have the claims of stability to be harmonized with those of progress. We are to reconcile liberty with equality, and both of them with order. The property rights of the individual we are to respect, yet we are not to press them to the point at which they threaten the welfare or the security of the many. We must preserve to justice its universal quality, and yet leave to it the capacity to be individual and particular.

Code is followed by commentary, and commentary by revision, and thus the task is never done.

I do not underrate the yearning for mechanical and formal tests. They are possible and useful in zones upon the legal sphere. The pain of choosing is the pain of marking off such zones from others. It is a pain we must endure, for uniformity of method will carry us upon the rocks. The curse of this fluidity, of an ever shifting approximation, is one the law must bear, or other curses yet more dreadful will be invited in exchange.