Top 35 Benjamin N. Cardozo Quotes (2025 Update)

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. “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 N. Cardozo

3. “The final cause of law is the welfare of society.”

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

4. “History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.”

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

5. “Law never is, but is always about to be.”

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

6. “Rest and motion, unrelieved and unchecked, are equally destructive.”

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

7. “Fraud includes the pretense of knowledge when knowledge there is none.”

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

8. “Justice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances. Substitute statute for decision, and you shift the center of authority, but add no quota of inspired wisdom.”

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

9. “The heroic hours of life do not announce their presence by drum and trumpet.”

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

10. “Not honesty alone, but the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive, is then the standard of behavior.”

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

11. “Method is much, technique is much, but inspiration is even more.”

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

12. “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 N. Cardozo

13. “Due process is a growth too sturdy to succumb to the infection of the least ingredient of error.”

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

14. “The repetition of a catchword can hold analysis in fetters for fifty years or more.”

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

15. “The validity of a tax depends upon its nature, and not upon its name.”

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

16. “I take judge-made law as one of the existing realities of life.”

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

17. “The risk to be percieved defines the duty to be obeyed.”

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

18. “The great tides and currents which engulf the rest of men do not turn aside in their course and pass the judges by.”

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

19. “The prophet and the martyr do not see the hooting throng. Their eyes are fixed on the eternities.”

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

20. “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

21. “Membership in the bar is a privilege burdened with conditions.”

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

22. “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 N. Cardozo

23. “The difference is no less real because it is of degree.”

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

24. “Inaction without more is not tantamount to choice.”

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

25. “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 N. Cardozo

26. “We seek to find peace of mind in the word, the formula, the ritual. The hope is illusion.”

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

27. “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 N. Cardozo

28. “The great generalities of the constitution have a content and a significance that vary from age to age.”

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

29. “Consequences cannot alter statutes, but may help to fix their meaning.”

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

30. “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

31. “Opinion has a significance proportioned to the sources that sustain it.”

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

32. “There are vogues and fashions in jurisprudence as in literature and art and dress.”

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

33. “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

34. “Justice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances.”

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

35. “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

36. “Expediency may tip the scales when arguments are nicely balanced.”

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

37. “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 N. Cardozo

38. “Prophecy, however honest, is generally a poor substitute for experience.”

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

39. “Code is followed by commentary, and commentary by revision, and thus the task is never done.”

— Benjamin N. Cardozo