48 Quotes by Benjamin Cardozo

It is for ordinary minds, not for psychoanalysts, that our rules of evidence are framed. They have their source very often in considerations of administrative convenience, or practical expediency, and not in rules of logic.

Expediency may tip the scales when arguments are nicely balanced.

Inaction without more is not tantamount to choice.

Danger invites rescue. ... The wrongdoer may not have foreseen the coming of a deliverer. He is accountable as if he had.

Not honesty alone, but the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive, is then the standard of behavior.

The difference is no less real because it is of degree.

The great generalities of the constitution have a content and a significance that vary from age to age.

The great tides and currents which engulf the rest of men do not turn aside in their course and pass the judges by.

In our worship of certainty we must distinguish between the sound certainty and the sham, between what is gold and what is tinsel; and then, when certainty is attained, we must remember that it is not the only good; that we can buy it at too high a price; that there is danger in perpetual quiescence as well as in perpetual motion; and that a compromise must be found in a principle of growth.