Quotes from Benjamin Cardozo

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

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.

History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

No judicial system could do society's work if each issue had to be decided afresh in every case which raised it.

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

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