Felix Frankfurter
Felix Frankfurter
Felix Frankfurterwas a jurist, who served as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Frankfurter was born in Vienna and immigrated to New York at the age of 12. He graduated from Harvard Law School and was active politically, helping to found the American Civil Liberties Union. He was a friend and adviser of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1939. Frankfurter served on the Supreme Court for 23 years, and was...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionSupreme Court Justice
Date of Birth15 November 1882
CountryUnited States of America
Felix Frankfurter quotes about
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
Ours is an accusational 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 charge against an accused out of his own mouth
Decisions of this Court do not have intrinsic authority
A license cannot be 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
The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes.
No office in the land is more important than that of being a citizen.
The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day. It does come, however slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority.
Freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of a free society.
It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have been forged in controversies involving not very nice people.
Freedom of expression is the well-spring of our civilization... The history of civilization is in considerable measure the displacement of error which once held sway as official truth by beliefs which in turn have yielded to other truths. Therefore the liberty of man to search for truth ought not to be fettered, no matter what orthodoxies he may challenge.
The ultimate foundation of a free society is the binding tie of cohesive sentiment.
We forget that the most successful statesmen have been professionals. Lincoln was a professional politician.
If nowhere else, in the relation between Church and State, "good fences make good neighbors.
The indispensible judicial requisite is intellectual humility.