Felix Frankfurter Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

Fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the expression of the institutionalized medium of reason, that’s all we have standing between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, unprincipled, undisciplined feeling.” Justice Felix Frankfurter, 1962

One of the prerogatives of American citizenship is the right to criticize public men and measures, and that means not only informed and responsible criticism but the freedom to speak foolishly and without moderation.

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

In 1942 the Polish resistance fighter Jan Karski gave eye witness testimony to the Supreme Court judge Felix Frankfurter of the clearing of the Warsaw Ghetto and the systematic murder of Polish Jews in the Belzec concentration camp. Listening to him, Frankfurter, himself a Jew, and one of the outstanding legal minds of his generation, replied, "I must be frank. I am unable to believe him." He added: "I did not say this young man is lying. I said I am unable to believe him. There is a difference.

[Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter to his law clerk Richard Goodwin] 'Our job is to enforce the law, including the Constitution,' the Justice repeatedly said. 'We have nothing to do with your abstract notions of justice or liberty. Only with what the law provides. Trample the law for your own ends, Dick, and the time will come when you’ll be trampled under someone else’s ends.

Rabbi Stephen Wise wrote to the legal scholar Felix Frankfurter that Roosevelt was “all clay and no granite,” because under only slight pressure from Hearst the governor had decided “to repudiate the League of Nations, lock, stock and barrel, and to talk like a Kansas grocery-store oracle about making the European nations pay their debts.

Too many men and governments the life of the human mind is a danger to be feared more than any other danger, and the Word which cannot be purchased, cannot be falsified, and cannot be killed is the enemy most hunted for and hated. It is not necessary to speak of the burning of the books in Germany, or of the victorious lie in Spain, or of the terror of the creative spirit in Russia, or of the hunting and hounding of those in this country who insist that certain truths be told and who will not be silent. These things are commonplace. They are commonplace to such a point that they no longer shock us into anger. Indeed it is the essential character of our time that the triumph of the lie, the mutilation of culture, and the persecution of the Word no longer shock us into anger.

Roosevelt had returned from Hyde Park troubled that Felix Frankfurter and Bohr had somehow breached Manhattan Project security, Bush and perhaps Conant had talked to Bohr and the two administrators had submitted to Stimson at his request a more detailed proposal incorporating Bohr’s ideas. In doing so they had explicitly recommended that the United States sacrifice some portion of its national sovereignty in exchange for effective international control, understanding as they did so that they would have to answer vigorous opposition:

Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late. Justice Felix Frankfurter Henslee v. Union Planters Bank, 1949.