Top 60 Felix Frankfurter Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Anybody who is any good is different from anybody else.”

— Felix Frankfurter

2. “No office in the land is more important than that of being a citizen.”

— Felix Frankfurter

3. “Gratitude is one of the least articulate of the emotions, especially when it is deep.”

— Felix Frankfurter

4. “Future lawyers should be more aware that law is not a system of abstract logic, but the web of arrangements, rooted in history but also in hopes, for promoting to a maximum the full use of a nation’s resources and talents.”

— Felix Frankfurter

5. “Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.”

— Felix Frankfurter

6. “The Procrustean bed is not a symbol of equality. It is no less inequality to have equality among unequals.”

— Felix Frankfurter

7. “It is a wise man who said that there is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals.”

— Felix Frankfurter

8. “Fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalised medium of reason, that’s all we have between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feelings.”

— Felix Frankfurter

9. “All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them.”

— Felix Frankfurter

10. “The most constructive way of resolving conflicts is to avoid them.”

— Felix Frankfurter

11. “Government is itself an art, one of the subtlest of the arts. It is neither business, nor technology, nor applied science. It is the art of making men live together in peace and with reasonable happiness.”

— Felix Frankfurter

12. “The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards.”

— Felix Frankfurter

13. “The indispensible judicial requisite is intellectual humility.”

— Felix Frankfurter

14. “We have enjoyed so much freedom for so long that we are perhaps in danger of forgetting how much blood it cost to establish the Bill of Rights.”

— Felix Frankfurter

15. “Without a free press there can be no free society. That is axiomatic. However, freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of a free society. The scope and nature of the constitutional guarantee of the freedom of the press are to be viewed and applied in that light.”

— Felix Frankfurter

16. “I know of no title that I deem more honorable than that of Professor of the Harvard Law School.”

— Felix Frankfurter

17. “Democracy is always a beckoning goal, not a safe harbor. For freedom is an unremitting endeavor, never a final achievement.”

— Felix Frankfurter

18. “The ultimate foundation of a free society is the binding tie of cohesive sentiment.”

— Felix Frankfurter

19. “Freedom of speech and of the press are essential to the enlightenment of a free people and in restraining those who wield power.”

— Felix Frankfurter

20. “I don’t like a man to be too efficient. He’s likely to be not human enough.”

— Felix Frankfurter

21. “It is easy to make light of insistence on scrupulous regard for the safeguards of civil liberties when invoked on behalf of the unworthy. History bears testimony that by such disregard are the rights of liberty extinguished, heedlessly at first, then stealthily, and brazenly in the end.”

— Felix Frankfurter

22. “The ultimate touchstone of constitutionality is the Constitution itself and not what we have said about it.”

— Felix Frankfurter

23. “The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes.”

— Felix Frankfurter

24. “A phrase begins life as a literary expression; its felicity leads to its lazy repetition; and repetition soon establishes it as a legal formula, undiscriminatingly used to express different and sometimes contradictory ideas.”

— Felix Frankfurter

25. “Litigation is the pursuit of practical ends, not a game of chess.”

— Felix Frankfurter

26. “There can be no security where there is fear.”

— Felix Frankfurter

27. “It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have been forged in controversies involving not very nice people.”

— Felix Frankfurter

28. “The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day. It does come, however slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority.”

— Felix Frankfurter

29. “There is no inevitability in history except as men make it.”

— Felix Frankfurter

30. “Ambiguity lurks in generality and may thus become an instrument of severity.”

— Felix Frankfurter

31. “Old age and sickness bring out the essential characteristics of a man.”

— Felix Frankfurter

32. “There is torture of mind as well as body; the will is as much affected by fear as by force. And there comes a point where this Court should not be ignorant as judges of what we know as men.”

— Felix Frankfurter

33. “No judge writes on a wholly clean slate.”

— Felix Frankfurter

34. “The eternal struggle in the law between constancy and change is largely a struggle between history and reason, between past reason and present needs.”

— Felix Frankfurter

35. “Freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of a free society.”

— Felix Frankfurter

36. “Judicial judgment must take deep account of the day before yesterday in order that yesterday may not paralyze today.”

— Felix Frankfurter

37. “It is hostile to a democratic system to involve the judiciary in the politics of the people.”

— Felix Frankfurter

38. “The dynamo of our economic system is self-interest which may range from mere petty greed to admirable types of self-expression.”

— Felix Frankfurter

39. “The line must follow some direction of policy, whether rooted in logic or experience. Lines should not be drawn simply for the sake of drawing lines.”

— Felix Frankfurter

40. “Is that which was deemed to be of so fundamental a nature as to be written into the Constitution to endure for all times to be the sport of shifting winds of doctrine?”

— Felix Frankfurter

41. “To be effective, judicial administration must not be leaden-footed.”

— Felix Frankfurter

42. “It is important not to give the appearance of a predisposed mind. And it is more important not to let the mind become predisposed.”

— Felix Frankfurter

43. “Appeal must be to an informed, civically militant electorate.”

— Felix Frankfurter

44. “It would be a narrow conception of jurisprudence to confine the notion of ‘laws’ to what is found written on the statute books, and to disregard the gloss which life has written upon it.”

— Felix Frankfurter

45. “It is anomalous to hold that in order to convict a man the police cannot extract by force what is in his mind, but can extract what is in his stomach.”

— Felix Frankfurter

46. “If one man can be allowed to determine for himself what is law, every man can. That means first chaos, then tyranny. Legal process is an essential part of the democratic process.”

— Felix Frankfurter

47. “Of compelling consideration is the fact that words acquire scope and function from the history of events which they summarize.”

— Felix Frankfurter

48. “In law also the emphasis makes the song.”

— Felix Frankfurter

49. “Morals are three-quarters manners.”

— Felix Frankfurter

50. “For the highest exercise of judicial duty is to subordinate one’s personal pulls and one’s private views to the law of which we are all guaradians – those impersonal convictions that made a society a civilized community, and not the victims of personal rule.”

— Felix Frankfurter