Felix Frankfurter Quotes

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.

To some lawyers all facts are created equal.

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

I don't like a man to be too efficient. He's likely to be not human enough.

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

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.

It simply is not true that war never settles anything.

The Court's authority - possessed of neither the purse nor the sword -ultimately rests on substantial public confidence in its moral sanctions.