Top 70 Learned Hand Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “In america, there are two tax systems: one for the informed and one for the uninformed. Both are legal.”

— Learned Hand

2. “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

3. “Tyranny is tyranny, no matter what its form; the free man will resist it if his courage serves.”

— Learned Hand

4. “There is nothing sinister in so arranging one’s affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible.”

— Learned Hand

5. “A self-made man may prefer a self-made name.”

— Learned Hand

6. “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.”

— Learned Hand

7. “The hand that rules the press, the radio, the screen and the far-spread magazine, rules the country.”

— Learned Hand

8. “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

9. “If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: thou shalt not ration justice.”

— Learned Hand

10. “The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understands the minds of other men and women.”

— Learned Hand

11. “Our common law is the stock instance of a combination of custom and its successive adaptations.”

— Learned Hand

12. “Words are chameleons, which reflect the color of their environment.”

— Learned Hand

13. “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

14. “Right knows no boundaries, and justice no frontiers; the brotherhood of man is not a domestic institution.”

— Learned Hand

15. “No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes the scripture.”

— Learned Hand

16. “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

17. “There is no surer way to misread any document than to read it literally.”

— Learned Hand

18. “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

19. “We recently had a referendum in New York about extending the forest preserve. The city voted for it by a large majority; yet as I walk the streets I do not see afforestation written with conviction on the harried faces of my fellow citizens.”

— Learned Hand

20. “The art of publicity is a black art.”

— Learned Hand

21. “A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few.”

— Learned Hand

22. “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

23. “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

24. “If a community decides that some conduct is prejudicial to itself, and so decides by numbers sufficient to impose its will upon dissenters, I know of no principle which can stay its hand.”

— Learned Hand

25. “Words are not pebbles in alien juxtaposition.”

— Learned Hand

26. “The language of the law must not be foreign to the ears of those who are to obey it.”

— Learned Hand

27. “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

28. “We shall succeed only so far as we continue that most distasteful of all activity, the intolerable labor of thought.”

— Learned Hand

29. “For, when all is said, as my friend George Rublee likes to put it, the only success is to be a success as a person; and it is still not too late for that.”

— Learned Hand

30. “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

31. “The successful competitor, having been urged to compete, must not be turned on when he wins.”

— Learned Hand

32. “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

33. “The aim of law is the maximum gratification of the nervous system of man.”

— Learned Hand

34. “Liberty is so much latitude as the powerful choose to accord to the weak.”

— Learned Hand

35. “Convention is like the shell to the chick, a protection till he is strong enough to break it through.”

— Learned Hand

Featured in: Strong Quotes

36. “We prate of freedom; we are in deadly fear of life, as much of our own American scene betrays.”

— Learned Hand

37. “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

38. “Life is made up of constant calls to action, and we seldom have time for more than hastily contrived answers.”

— Learned Hand

39. “All discussion, all debate, all dissidence tends to question and in consequence, to upset existing convictions; that is precisely its purpose and its justification.”

— Learned Hand

40. “The spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not quite sure it is right.”

— Learned Hand

41. “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

42. “What to an outsider will be no more than the vigorous presentation of a conviction, to an employee may be the manifestation of a determination which it is not safe to thwart.”

— Learned Hand

43. “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

44. “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

45. “The apathy of the modern voter is the confusion of the modern reformer.”

— Learned Hand

46. “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

47. “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

48. “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

49. “The use of history is to tell us what we are, for at our birth we are nearly empty vessels and we become what our tradition pours into us.”

— Learned Hand

50. “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