The hand that rules the press, the radio, the screen and the far-spread magazine, rules the country.
—Learned Hand
Topics: Media
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 further inertia and the irksomeness of action.
—Learned Hand
Topics: Change
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 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 understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned, but has never quite forgotten; that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest.
—Learned Hand
Topics: Spirit
Words are chameleons, which reflect the color of their environment.
—Learned Hand
Topics: Words
Life is made up of constant calls to action, and we seldom have time for more than hastily contrived answers.
—Learned Hand
Topics: Life
When I hear so much impatient and irritable complaint, so much readiness to replace what we have by guardians for us all, those supermen, evoked somewhere from the clouds, whom none have seen and none are ready to name, I lapse into a dream… I see children playing on the grass, …they are restive and quarrelsome; they cannot agree to any common plan; their play annoys them; it goes poorly. And one says, let us make Jack the master; Jack knows all about it; Jack will tell us what each is to do and we shall all agree. But Jack is like all the rest; Helen is discontented with her part and Henry with his, and soon they fall again into their old state. No, the children must learn to play by themselves; there is no Jack the master. And in the end slowly and with infinite disappointment they do learn a little; they learn to forbear, to reckon with another, accept a little where they wanted much, to live and let live, to yield when they must yield; perhaps, we may hope, not to take all they can. But the condition is that they shall be willing at least to listen to one another, to get the habit of pooling their wishes. Somehow or other they must do this, if the play is to go on; maybe it will not, but there is no Jack, in or out of the box, who can come to straighten the game.
—Learned Hand
As soon as we cease to pry about at random, we shall come to rely upon accredited bodies of authoritative dogma; and as soon as we come to rely upon accredited bodies of authoritative dogma, not only are the days of our liberty over, but we have lost the password that has hitherto opened to us the gates of success as well.
—Learned Hand
Topics: Beliefs
Anyone may so arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible. He is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one’s taxes.
—Learned Hand
Topics: Taxation
If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: Thou shalt not ration justice.
—Learned Hand
Topics: Justice
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.
—Learned Hand
Topics: Oppression
Life is not a thing of knowing only—nay, mere knowledge has properly no place at all save as it becomes the handmaiden of feeling and emotions.
—Learned Hand
Topics: Knowledge
Our dangers, as it seems to me, are not from the outrageous but from the conforming; not from those who rarely and under the lurid glare of obloquy upset our moral complaisance, or shock us with unaccustomed conduct, but from those, the mass of us, who take their virtues and their tastes, like their shirts and their furniture, from the limited patterns which the market offers.
—Learned Hand
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.
—Learned Hand
Topics: Justice
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.
—Learned Hand
Topics: Choice
A self-made man may prefer a self-made name.
—Learned Hand
Topics: Self-Discovery
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Robert Anton Wilson American Polymath
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. American Jurist, Author
- Archibald Cox American Lawyer
- Felix Frankfurter Austrian-Born Jurist
- Elihu Root American Statesman
- Jane Addams American Social Reformer
- Louis Brandeis American Jurist
- Henry L. Stimson American Statesman
- Arthur Rubinstein American Pianist
- Irving Berlin American Composer, Songwriter
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