"I know of no title that I deem more honorable than that of Professor of the Harvard Law School."
~ Justice Felix Frankfurter
"There can be no security where there is fear."
~ Justice Felix Frankfurter
"Without a free press there can be no free society. That is axiomatic. However, freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of a free society. The scope and nature of the constitutional guarantee of the freedom of the press are to be viewed and applied in that light."
~ Justice Felix Frankfurter
"It is a wise man who said that there is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals."
~ Justice Felix Frankfurter
"Freedom of speech and of the press are essential to the enlightenment of a free people and in restraining those who wield power."
~ Justice Felix Frankfurter
"In law also the emphasis makes the song."
~ Justice Felix Frankfurter
"Democracy is always a beckoning goal, not a safe harbor. For freedom is an unremitting endeavor, never a final achievement."
~ Justice Felix Frankfurter
"The most constructive way of resolving conflicts is to avoid them."
~ Justice Felix Frankfurter
"The indispensible judicial requisite is intellectual humility."
~ Justice Felix Frankfurter
"I don’t like a man to be too efficient. He’s likely to be not human enough."
~ Justice Felix Frankfurter
"Ambiguity lurks in generality, and may thus become an instrument of severity."
~ Justice Felix Frankfurter
"It is hostile to a democratic system to involve the judiciary in the politics of the people."
~ Justice Felix Frankfurter
"Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late."
~ Justice Felix Frankfurter
"Litigation is the pursuit of practical ends, not a game of chess."
~ Justice Felix Frankfurter
"Convictions following the admission into evidence of confessions which are involuntary, i.e., the product of coercion, either physical or psychological, cannot stand. This is so not because such confessions are unlikely to be true but because the methods used to extract them offend an underlying principle in the enforcement of our criminal law: that ours is an accusatorial, 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 charges against an accused out of his own mouth."
~ Justice Felix Frankfurter
"No court can make time stand still."
~ Justice Felix Frankfurter
"It is important not to give the appearance of a predisposed mind. And it is more important not to let the mind become predisposed."
~ Justice Felix Frankfurter
"It is easy to make light of insistence on scrupulous regard for the safeguards of civil liberties when invoked on behalf of the unworthy. It is too easy. History bears testimony that by such disregard are the rights of liberty extinguished, heedlessly at first, then stealthily, and brazenly in the end."
~ Justice Felix Frankfurter
"All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them."
~ Justice Felix Frankfurter
"In the first place, lawyers better remember they are human beings, and a human being who hasn't his periods of doubts and distresses and disappointments must be a cabbage, not a human being. That is number one."
~ Justice Felix Frankfurter
"What becomes decisive to a Justice's functioning on the Court in the large area within which his individuality moves is his general attitude toward law, the habits of the mind that he has formed or is capable of unforming, his capacity for detachment, his temperament or training for putting his passion behind his judgment instead of in front of it. The attitudes and qualities which I am groping to characterize are ingredients of what compendiously might be called dominating humility."
~ Justice Felix Frankfurter
"A license cannot 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. If a State licensing agency lays bare its arbitrary action, or if the State law explicitly allows it to act arbitrarily, that is precisely the kind of State action which the Due Process Clause forbids."
~ Justice Felix Frankfurter
"The mark of a truly civilized man is confidence in the strength and security derived from the inquiring mind."
~ Justice Felix Frankfurter
"Liberty of thought soon shrivels without freedom of expression. Nor can truth be pursued in an atmosphere hostile to the endeavor or under dangers which are hazarded only by heroes."
~ Justice Felix Frankfurter
"The eternal struggle in the law between constancy and change is largely a struggle between history and reason, between past reason and present needs."
~ Justice Felix Frankfurter
"Answers are not obtained by putting the wrong question and thereby begging the real one."
~ Justice Felix Frankfurter