Top 49 Cardozo Quotes
#1. The outstanding examples are still Cardozo's Nature of the Judicial Process18
Richard A. Posner
#2. At Cardozo, study of law is part of a larger culture. You can get a law degree and make a good living, but it is best that you do that having studied the discipline for its own inherent merit, because you love studying.
Norman Lamm
#3. I think our vision heretofore has been and should continue to be to have Cardozo be the kind of law school that we can be proud of. I would like to see it gain recognition as one of the three best law schools in New York City.
Norman Lamm
#4. 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
#6. Justice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances.
Benjamin Cardozo
#7. The great tides and currents which engulf the rest of men do not turn aside in their course and pass the judges by.
Benjamin Cardozo
#8. Even if dogma has a purpose, it can never function as a substitute for faith, only as a dry aspect of it.
Nathan Lopes Cardozo
#9. 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
#10. 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
#12. The prophet and the martyr do not see the hooting throng. Their eyes are fixed on the eternities.
Benjamin Cardozo
#13. Danger invites rescue ... The wrongdoer may not have foreseen the coming of a deliverer. He is accountable as if he had.
Benjamin Cardozo
#14. 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
#15. 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
#18. There are vogues and fashions in jurisprudence as in literature and art and dress.
Benjamin N. Cardozo
#19. History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.
Benjamin Cardozo
#20. Justice, though due to the accused, is due the accuser also. The concept of fairness cannot be strained till it is narrowed to a filament. We are to keep our balance true.
Benjamin Cardozo
#21. What has once been settled by a precedent will not be unsettled overnight, for certainty and uniformity are gains not lightly sacrificed. Above all is this true when honest men have shaped their conduct on the faith of the pronouncement.
Benjamin Cardozo
#22. Fraud includes the pretense of knowledge when knowledge there is none.
Benjamin Cardozo
#23. Consequences cannot alter statutes, but may help to fix their meaning.
Benjamin Cardozo
#24. The great ideals of liberty and equality are preserved against the assaults of opportunism, the expediency of the passing hour, the erosion of small encroachments, the scorn and derision of those who have no patience with general principles.
Benjamin Cardozo
#25. I take judge-made law as one of the existing realities of life.
Benjamin Cardozo
#26. Membership in the bar is a privilege burdened with conditions.
Benjamin Cardozo
#27. 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
#28. 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.
Benjamin Cardozo
#29. It is when the colors do not match, when the references in the index fail, when there is no decisive precedent, that the serious business of the judge begins
Benjamin Cardozo
#30. The Constitution was framed upon the theory that the peoples of the several states must sink or swim together, and that in the long run prosperity and salvation are in union and not division.
Benjamin Cardozo
#31. The repetition of a catchword can hold analysis in fetters for fifty years or more.
Benjamin Cardozo
#32. Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.
Benjamin Cardozo
#33. Opinion has a significance proportioned to the sources that sustain it.
Benjamin Cardozo
#34. The great generalities of the constitution have a content and a significance that vary from age to age.
Benjamin Cardozo
#35. The judge is not the knight-errant, roaming at will in pursuit of his own ideal of beauty or of goodness.
Benjamin N. Cardozo
#36. 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
#37. 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
#39. Rest and motion, unrelieved and unchecked, are equally destructive.
Benjamin Cardozo
#40. With traps and obstacles and hazards confronting us on every hand, only blindness or indifference will fail to turn in all humility, for guidance or for warning, to the study of examples.
Benjamin Cardozo
#41. The validity of a tax depends upon its nature, and not upon its name.
Benjamin Cardozo
#42. 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
#43. Method is much, technique is much, but inspiration is even more.
Benjamin Cardozo
#45. We seek to find peace of mind in the word, the formula, the ritual. The hope is illusion.
Benjamin Cardozo
#46. In the end the great truth will have been learned that the quest is greater than what is sought, the effort finer that the prize (or rather, that the effort is the prize), the victory cheap and hollow were it not for the rigor of the game.
Benjamin Cardozo
#47. Prophecy, however honest, is generally a poor substitute for experience.
Benjamin Cardozo
#48. Code is followed by commentary, and commentary by revision, and thus the task is never done.
Benjamin Cardozo
#49. 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
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