Cardozo Quotes & Sayings

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

[I]t is no doubt true that our image of what a messiah might look like may keep us from recognizing the real thing when it stands before us. Could it be that we have embellished the long-awaited event with so many aggadic flourishes that we can no longer recognize the reality when it happens? Could our overly literal reading of our sages' poetic descriptions have led us to overlook completely the miracle as it happened?
One of the dangers of taking the statements and speculations of our sages as literal truth - when they were not meant as such - is the distortion of our expectations. — Nathan Lopes Cardozo

The great generalities of the constitution have a content and a significance that vary from age to age. — Benjamin Cardozo

The risk to be perceived defines the duty to be obeyed. — Benjamin Cardozo

We seldom stop to think - and we certainly should do so more often - that in taking the words of our sages as a description of mere fact, we may miss the deeper meanings which they meant to convey. As a rule, aggadah should not be taken literally; rather, it must be interpreted with the understanding that a higher truth is being alluded to - a truth that is beyond historical perspective, philological expression, or the dimensions of scientific observations. Agaddah speaks to that part of us that understands but cannot articulate what it understands. It allows us to go beyond the realms of the definable, perceivable, and demonstrable. In this sense, aggadah is a form of religious metaphor, a mirror that enables us to form mental images of the indescribable. — Nathan Lopes Cardozo

I own that it is a good deal of a mystery to me how judges, of all persons in the world, should put their faith in dicta. A brief experience on the bench was enough to reveal to me all sorts of cracks and crevices and loopholes in my own opinions when picked up a few months after delivery and reread with due contrition. — Benjamin N. Cardozo

The prophet and the martyr do not see the hooting throng. Their eyes are fixed on the eternities. — Benjamin Cardozo

Code is followed by commentary, and commentary by revision, and thus the task is never done. — Benjamin Cardozo

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

Fraud includes the pretense of knowledge when knowledge there is none. — Benjamin Cardozo

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

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

Law never is, but is always about to be. — Benjamin Cardozo

In our worship of certainty we must distinguish between the sound certainty and the sham, between what is gold and what is tinsel; and then, when certainty is attained, we must remember that it is not the only good; that we can buy it at too high a price; that there is danger in perpetual quiescence as well as in perpetual motion; and that a compromise must be found in a principle of growth. — Benjamin Cardozo

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

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

Jews have been an ever-dying people that never died. They have experienced a continuous resurrection, like the dry bones that Ezekiel saw in the valley. This has become the sine qua non of every Jew. It is the mystery of the hidden miracle of survival in the face of overwhelming destruction. Our refusal to surrender has turned our story into one long, unending Purim tale. — Nathan Lopes Cardozo

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

Prophecy, however honest, is generally a poor substitute for experience. — Benjamin Cardozo

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

Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom. — Benjamin Cardozo

Opinion has a significance proportioned to the sources that sustain it. — Benjamin Cardozo

As I search the archives of my memory I seem to discern six types or methods [of judicial writing] which divide themselves from one another with measurable distinctness. There is the type magisterial or imperative; the type laconic or sententious; the type conversational or homely; the type refined or artificial, smelling of the lamp, verging at times upon preciosity or euphuism; the demonstrative or persuasive; and finally the type tonsorial or agglutinative, so called from the shears and the pastepot which are its implements and emblem. — Benjamin Cardozo

Membership in the bar is a privilege burdened with conditions. — Benjamin Cardozo

I take judge-made law as one of the existing realities of life. — Benjamin Cardozo

Rest and motion, unrelieved and unchecked, are equally destructive. — Benjamin Cardozo

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

The final cause of law is the welfare of society. — Benjamin Cardozo

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

History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future. — Benjamin Cardozo

We seek to find peace of mind in the word, the formula, the ritual. The hope is illusion. — Benjamin Cardozo

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

The validity of a tax depends upon its nature, and not upon its name. — Benjamin Cardozo

Justice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances. — Benjamin Cardozo

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

The repetition of a catchword can hold analysis in fetters for fifty years or more. — Benjamin Cardozo

Method is much, technique is much, but inspiration is even more. — Benjamin Cardozo

The difference is no less real because it is of degree. — Benjamin Cardozo

More truly characteristic of dissent is a dignity, an elevation, of mood and thought and phrase. Deep conviction and warm feeling are saying their last say with knowledge that the cause is lost. The voice of the majority may be that of force triumphant, content with the plaudits of the hour, and recking little of the morrow. The dissenter speaks to the future, and his voice is pitched to a key that will carry through the years. — Benjamin Cardozo

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

When I was in law school I was taught that the great writers were people like [Oliver Wendell] Holmes Jr. and [Benjamin N.] Cardozo. But you go back and read their prose and it's sort of perfumed and very ornate and show-offy. And they're constantly striving for these abstractions that seem archaic nowadays. — Jeffrey Rosen

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

The judge is not the knight-errant, roaming at will in pursuit of his own ideal of beauty or of goodness. — Benjamin N. Cardozo

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

Danger invites rescue ... The wrongdoer may not have foreseen the coming of a deliverer. He is accountable as if he had. — Benjamin Cardozo

The outstanding examples are still Cardozo's Nature of the Judicial Process18 — Richard A. Posner

The heroic hours of life do not announce their presence by drum and trumpet, challenging us to be true to ourselves by appeals to the martial spirit that keeps the blood at heat. Some little, unassuming, unobtrusive choice presents itself before us slyly and craftily, glib and insinuating, in the modest garb of innocence ... Then it is that you will be summoned to show the courage of adventurous youth. — Benjamin Cardozo

There are vogues and fashions in jurisprudence as in literature and art and dress. — Benjamin N. Cardozo

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

The risk to be percieved defines the duty to be obeyed. — Benjamin Cardozo

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

There comes not seldom a crisis in the life of men, of nations, and of worlds, when the old forms seem ready to decay, and the old rules of action have lost their binding force. The evils of existing systems obscure the blessings that attend them, and, where reform is needed, the cry is raised for subversion. — Benjamin N. Cardozo

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

In law, as in every other branch of knowledge, the truths given by induction tend to form the premises for new deductions. The lawyers and the judges of successive generations do not repeat for themselves the process of verification any more than most of us repeat the demonstrations of the truths of astronomy or physics. — Benjamin N. Cardozo

Inaction without more is not tantamount to choice. — Benjamin Cardozo

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

Consequences cannot alter statutes, but may help to fix their meaning. — Benjamin Cardozo

The rules and principles of case law have never been treated as final truths but as working hypotheses, continually retested in those great laboratories of the law, the courts of justice. Every new case is an experiment, and if the accepted rule which seems applicable yields a result which is felt to be unjust, the rule is reconsidered. — Benjamin N. Cardozo

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

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

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