Top 100 Learned Hand Quotes
#1. Our Founding Fathers were the first to articulate the reasons for their First Amendment, the same reasons given by Learned Hand, and by Justice Brennan in New York Times v. Sullivan . It is a lesson we keep forgetting and must relearn in each succeeding generation.
Gilbert S. Merritt Jr.
#3. What the learned world tends to offer is one second-hand scrap of information illustrating ideas derived from another second-hand scrap of information. The second-handedness of the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity.
Alfred North Whitehead
#4. It lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it. While it lies there, it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.
Learned Hand
#6. Surely not a palm lock, she told herself. A palm lock must be keyed to one individual's hand shape and palm lines. But it looked like a palm lock. And there were ways to open any palm lock - as she had learned at school.
Frank Herbert
#7. She's a lovely young woman from upstate New York, but you should be very thankful for those romance-novel-reading, tween-movie-watching women. They've had a big hand in making our town a success." "And Julian's love life, once he learned to spray himself with glitter.
Kristen Painter
#8. What seems fair enough against a squalid huckster of bad liquor may take on a different face, if used by a government determined to suppress political opposition under the guise of sedition.
Learned Hand
#9. We accept the verdict of the past until the need for change cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of inertia and the irksomeness of action.
Learned Hand
#10. Heretics have been hated from the beginning of recorded time; they have been ostracized, exiled, tortured, maimed, and butchered; but it has generally proved impossible to smother them; and when it has not, the society that has succeeded has always declined.
Learned Hand
#11. But what I learned from the Widow's Hand is that whose who would be gods fear no one so much as other potential deities
Salman Rushdie
#12. In the military, I learned that 'leadership' means raising your hand and volunteering for the tough, important assignments.
Tulsi Gabbard
#13. The apathy of the modern voter is the confusion of the modern reformer.
Learned Hand
#14. It is enough that we set out to mold the motley stuff of life into some form of our own choosing; when we do, the performance is itself the wage.
Learned Hand
#15. I definitely hand myself over to the hair and makeup gods of 'Girls.' Our look on the show is very specific, and it's different from mine in real life, although I've definitely learned things from working with both the hair and makeup people for the show.
Allison Williams
#16. Long before I learned to do a sum in arithmetic or describe the shape of the earth, Miss Sullivan had taught me to find beauty in the fragrant woods, in every blade of grass, and in the curves and dimples of my baby sister's hand.
Helen Keller
#17. The public needs the equivalent of Chevrolets as well as Cadillacs.
Learned Hand
#18. I'm not an old, experienced hand at politics. But I am now seasoned enough to have learned that the hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning.
Adlai E. Stevenson
#19. A hard lesson had been learned
that man himself suffers most when his hand despoils the earth and robs it of its legitimate fruits.
Lois Lenski
#20. The legal relations between the individual and the community which arise out of the production and distribution of property, comprise by far the greater, and more important, part of the law; subtract these and very little content would be left.
Learned Hand
#21. We shall succeed only so far as we continue that most distasteful of all activity, the intolerable labor of thought.
Learned Hand
#22. Now this little gal isn't much of a singer," she would say. "She learned singing by a correspondence course, and she missed a coupla lessons, but she's the nicest little gal in the whole show, so I want ya to give her a big hand.
Bill Bryson
#23. The fathers who contrived and passed the Consititution were wise in their generation; as time passes, we come more and more to realize their powers of divination.
Learned Hand
#24. Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another) ... There are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.
Harper Lee
#25. In america, there are two tax systems: one for the informed and one for the uninformed. Both are legal
Learned Hand
#26. The mutual confidence on which all else depends can be maintained only by an open mind and a brave reliance upon free discussion.
Learned Hand
#27. The condition of our survival in any but the meagerest existence is our willingness to accommodate ourselves to the conflicting interests of others, to learn to live in a social world.
Learned Hand
#28. I hung a picture of him above my bed and learned by hand the internal workings of the female combustion engine.
Shannon Celebi
#29. The language of the law must not be foreign to the ears of those who are to obey it.
Learned Hand
#30. There is nothing sinister in so arranging one's affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible.
Learned Hand
#31. Conservative political opinion in America cleaves to the tradition of the judge as passive interpreter, believing that his absolute loyalty to authoritative law is the price of his immunity from political pressure and of the security of his tenure.
Learned Hand
#32. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.
Learned Hand
#33. Every smallest step of modern industry depends upon a cooperation whose maintenance and regulation is the very stuff of law.
Learned Hand
#34. If your current get-rich project fails, take what you learned and try something else. Keep repeating until something lucky happens. The universe has plenty of luck to go around; you just need to keep your hand raised until it's your turn. It helps to see failure as a road and not a wall.
Scott Adams
#35. We all have our prayer-wheels which we set up on the steppes. The indifferent winds come and carry most of them away to gasp out their little lives in the desert, for few reach heaven.
Learned Hand
#36. When I was a child, I was unable to go to any type of sleepaway summer camp because of health issues. Once I learned about the Lopez Foundation, I knew I wanted to get involved, send kids with kidney disease away to camp so they can still experience overnight camp with medical needs at hand.
Sarah Hyland
#37. We lose the forest for the trees, forgetting, even so far as we think at all, that we are trustees for those who come after us, squandering the patrimony which we have received.
Learned Hand
#38. I recently learned something quite interesting about video games. Many young people have developed incredible hand, eye, and brain coordination in playing these games. The air force believes these kids will be our outstanding pilots should they fly our jets.
Ronald Reagan
#39. No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes scripture.
Learned Hand
#40. Today in America vast concourses of youth are flocking to our colleges, eager for something, just what they do not know.
Learned Hand
#41. When I was a kid, I was one of those really obnoxious 'oooh oooh' girls, with my hand up in the air constantly. I've learned over the years that that's not so attractive, so I've censored that.
Claire Danes
#42. And so gentlemen, I learned. Oh, if you have to learn, you learn; if you're desperate for a way out, you learn; you learn pitilessly. You stand over yourself with a whip in your hand; if there's the least resistance, you lash yourself.
Franz Kafka
#43. Most talk about 'super-geniuses' is nonsense. I have found that when 'stars' drop out, successors are usually at hand to fill their places, and the successors are merely men who have learned by application and self-discipline to get full production from an average, normal brain.
Charles M. Schwab
#44. The art of publicity is a black art; but it has come to stay, and every year adds to its potency.
Learned Hand
#45. For such is the nature of man, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; Yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves: For they see their own wit at hand, and other mens at a distance.
Thomas Hobbes
#46. Do you want to be made well? I like this question for all that's behind it. The healers are asking: Are you willing to have a new experience? You know sickness, but you don't know wellness. You've learned how to manage what you do know. You know it like the back of your hand.
Monica A. Coleman
#47. Later, holding Milo's hand in the dark, Jacob felt that it was only in recovering it that he learned what he had been in danger of losing. The touch of Milo's hand seemed to remind him of parts of himself that he had already begun to forget about.
Caleb Crain
#48. The young man should first learn perspective, then the proportions of objects. Next, copy work after the hand of a good master, to gain the habit of drawing parts of the body well; and then to work from nature, to confirm the lessons learned.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#49. You cannot raise the standard against oppression, or leap into the breach to relieve injustice, and still keep an open mind to every disconcerting fact, or an open ear to the cold voice of doubt.
Learned Hand
#50. Words are chameleons, which reflect the color of their environment.
Learned Hand
#51. 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.
Learned Hand
#52. Here I am an old man in a long nightgown making muffled noises at people who may be no worse than I am.
Learned Hand
#54. I have learned from first hand experience that war is the destroyer of everything that is good in the world, it turns our young into soulless killers and we tell them that they are heroes when they master the 'art' of killing.
Kevin Benderman
#55. Tyranny is tyranny, no matter what its form; the free man will resist it if his courage serves.
Learned Hand
#56. I have never learned to draw a hand well enough, so why should I stop trying now?
Jack Levine
#57. The successful competitor, having been urged to compete, must not be turned on when he wins.
Learned Hand
#58. When we looked at God's wisdom, we saw something of his mind; when we thought of his power, we saw something of his hand and his arm; when we considered his word, we learned about his mouth; but now, contemplating his love, we are to look into his heart.
J.I. Packer
#59. Convention is like the shell to the chick, a protection till he is strong enough to break it through.
Learned Hand
#60. In the end it is worse to suppress dissent than to run the risk of heresy.
Learned Hand
#61. I would like to leave the world a better place than when I entered it. I would hope that by the time I die I could have learned from the years of living and hand something down.
Albert Hammond Jr.
#62. Any one may so arrange his affairs that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which will best pay the Treasury; there is not even a patriotic duty to increase ones taxes.
Learned Hand
#63. Had the followers of Jesus remained an obscure Jewish sect, most of you would not have learned to read, and the rest of you would be reading from hand-copied scrolls.
Rodney Stark
#64. If we are to keep democracy, there must be a commandment: Thou shalt not ration justice.
Learned Hand
#65. The soul that has learned the blessed secret of seeing God's hand in all that concerns it, cannot be a prey to fear, it looks beyond all second causes, straight into the heart and will of God, and rests content, because He rules.
Susannah Spurgeon
#66. Life is not a thing of knowing only
nay, mere knowledge has properly no place at all save as it becomes the handmaiden of feeling and emotions.
Learned Hand
#67. In the fourth grade, I learned how to fake walking into a door. You know, you hit it with your hand and snap your head back. The girls loved it.
Will Ferrell
#68. When nothing else worked, we created a holistic, hand-tailored program that saved Pax's life. At Passages, he and I use what we learned in curing him to help other discover the roots of their addiction or alcoholism and break free.
Chris Prentiss
#69. Skepticism is my only gospel, but I don't want to make a dogma out of it.
Learned Hand
#70. I think I have learned, in some degree at least, to disregard the old maxim ""Do not get others to do what you can do yourself."" My motto on the other hand is; ""Do not do that which others can do as well.
Booker T. Washington
#71. Justice is the tolerable accommodation of the conflicting interests of society, and I don't believe there is any royal road to attain such accommodation concretely.
Learned Hand
#72. On the other hand, I have never before so learned to know the Lord Jesus as a tender, loving Friend, who never forsakes us or casts us off when we are bad, but rather helps us to gain the mastery over sin.
Corrie Ten Boom
#73. I'm just a black hole for stuff. No one should ever hand me anything, because I get so easily distracted. I'll be like, 'Oh, look, something shiny!' I'm glad I never learned how to drive. I would be really dangerous.
Florence Welch
#74. I was hesitant to go around and shake hands, just go up and stick my hand out to strangers. Then I learned to stick my hand out.
Jim Edgar
#75. How long shall we blunder along without the aid of unpartisan and authoritative scientific assistance in the administration of justice, no one knows; but all fair persons not conventionalized by provincial legal habits of mind ought, I should think, unite to effect some change.
Learned Hand
#76. For myself it would be most irksome to be ruled by a bevy of Platonic Guardians, even if I knew how to choose them, which I assuredly do not.
Learned Hand
#77. I've learned to dance with a hand in my pants.
Billy Joel
#78. A child her wayward pencil drew
On margins of her book;
Garlands of flower, dancing elves,
Bud, butterfly, and brook,
Lessons undone, and plum forgot,
Seeking with hand and heart
The teacher whom she learned to love
Before she knew t'was Art.
Louisa May Alcott
#79. Would we hold liberty, we must have charity- charity to others, charity to ourselves, crawling up from the moist ovens of a steaming world, still carrying the passional equipment of our ferocious ancestors, emerging from black superstition amid carnage and atrocity to our perilous present.
Learned Hand
#80. She learned to catch a moment in her hand before it flew away and hold it tightly while she had the chance.
Beth Moore
#81. 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.
Learned Hand
#82. It is still in the lap of the gods whether a society can succeed which is based on "civil liberties and human rights" conceived as I have tried to describe them; but of one thing at least we may be sure: the alternatives that have so far appeared have been immeasurably worse.
Learned Hand
#83. The mid-day sun is too much for most eyes; one is dazzled even with its reflection. Be careful that too broad and high an aim does not paralyze your effort and clog your springs of action.
Learned Hand
#84. I had rather take my chance that some traitors will escape detection than spread abroad a spirit of general suspicion and distrust, which accepts rumor and gossip in place of undismayed and unintimidated inquiry.
Learned Hand
#85. Since we are men, we will play the part of Man.
Learned Hand
#86. Liberty is so much latitude as the powerful choose to accord to the weak.
Learned Hand
#87. When you're in a songwriting class, and you write a song, and you hand it in to a teacher to grade, I'm still going to say that it's a really awesome song whether I got an A or a D. I learned to stick to my guns and take the tools as tools and not as rules.
Madi Diaz
#88. I shall ask no more than that you agree with Dean Inge that even though counting heads is not an ideal way to govern, at least it is better than breaking them.
Learned Hand
#89. Life is a lesson, when you could get it over by your hands, means you just learned it well.
Kambiz Shabankareh
#90. We may win when we lose, if we have done what we can; for by so doing we have made real at least some part of that finished product in whose fabrication we are most concerned: ourselves.
Learned Hand
#91. The spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not quite sure it is right.
Learned Hand
#92. We all learned to think before we spoke and to limit what we said to the problem at hand.
Richard H. O'Kane
#93. My grandfather taught me generosity. He sold snow cones in Harlem. I went with him at 5 and he let me hand out the change and snow cones. I learned a lot in the couple of years that we did that.
Erik Estrada
#94. Our common law is the stock instance of a combination of custom and its successive adaptations.
Learned Hand
#95. Those of us who have come to years of discretion and more, must often take to retrospect, and seek to appraise the outcome of our lives.
Learned Hand
#96. Life in a great society, or for that matter in a small, is a web of tangled relations of all sorts, whose adjustment so that it may be endurable is an extraordinarily troublesome matter.
Learned Hand
#97. There is no surer way to misread any document than to read it literally.
Learned Hand
#98. Life is made up of a series of judgments on insufficient data, and if we waited to run down all our doubts, it would flow past us.
Learned Hand
#99. like most men skilled at their work they were scornful of any least suggestion of knowing anything not learned at first hand.
Cormac McCarthy
#100. The hand that rules the press, the radio, the screen and the far-spread magazine, rules the country.
Learned Hand
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