Authors

Learned Hand Quotes

Best Quotes by Learned Hand (Top 9)

  1. 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 inertia and the irksomeness of action.
  2. Life is made up of constant calls to action, and we seldom have time for more than hastily contrived answers.
  3. The hand that rules the press, the radio, the screen and the far-spread magazine, rules the country.
  4. 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 understands the minds of other men and women.
  5. If we are to keep democracy, there must be a commandment: Thou shalt not ration justice.
  6. The aim of law is the maximum gratification of the nervous system of man.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.