Benjamin N. Cardozo Quotes

#1. The judge is not the knight-errant, roaming at will in pursuit of his own ideal of beauty or of goodness.

Benjamin N. Cardozo

#2. The outstanding truths of life, the great and unquestioned phenomena of society, are not to be argued away as myths and vagaries when they do not fit within our little moulds. If necessary, we must remake the moulds.

Benjamin N. Cardozo

#3. Lawsuits are rare and catastrophic experiences for the vast majority of men, and even when the catastrophe ensues, the controversy relates most often not to the law, but to the facts. In countless litigations, the law Is so clear that judges have no discretion.

Benjamin N. Cardozo

#4. To the question how one kind of labor can be measured against another, how the labor of the artisan can be measured against the labor of the artist, how the labor of the strong can be measured against the labor of the weak, the communists can give no answer.

Benjamin N. Cardozo

#5. There is in each of us a stream of tendency, whether you choose to call it philosophy or not, which gives coherence and direction to thought and action. Judges cannot escape that current any more than other mortals.

Benjamin N. Cardozo

#6. The Constitution overrides a statute, but a statute, if consistent with the Constitution, overrides the law of judges. In this sense, judge-made law is secondary and subordinate to the law that is made by legislators.

Benjamin N. Cardozo

#7. In truth, I am nothing but a plodding mediocrity - please observe, a plodding mediocrity - for a mere mediocrity does not go very far, but a plodding one gets quite a distance. There is joy in that success, and a distinction can come from courage, fidelity and industry.

Benjamin N. Cardozo

#8. The work of deciding cases goes on every day in hundreds of courts throughout the land. Any judge, one might suppose, would find it easy to describe the process which he had followed a thousand times and more. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Benjamin N. Cardozo

#9. The constant assumption runs throughout the law that the natural and spontaneous evolutions of habit fix the limits of right and wrong.

Benjamin N. Cardozo

#10. A trustee is held to something stricter than the morals of the market place. Not honesty alone, but the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive, is then the standard of behavior.

Benjamin N. Cardozo

#11. History or custom or social utility or some compelling sense of justice or sometimes perhaps a semi-intuitive apprehension of the pervading spirit of our law must come to the rescue of the anxious judge and tell him where to go.

Benjamin N. Cardozo

#12. There are vogues and fashions in jurisprudence as in literature and art and dress.

Benjamin N. Cardozo