113 Quotes by Learned Hand

There is no fury like that against one who, we fear, may succeed in making us disloyal to beliefs we hold with passion, but have not really won.

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.

If the prosecution of crime is to be conducted with so little regard for that protection which centuries of English law have given to the individual, we are indeed at the dawn of a new era; and much that we have deemed vital to our liberties, is a delusion.

Since we are men, we will play the part of Man.

We shall succeed only so far as we continue that most distasteful of all activity, the intolerable labor of thought.

A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few.

Words are not pebbles in alien juxtaposition.

The spirit of liberty is the spirit of him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned ... .

No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes the scripture.