Felix Frankfurter......................

Felix Frankfurter   Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court  1939-1962

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

"Answers are not obtained by putting the wrong question and thereby begging the real one."


"I don't like a man to be too efficient. He's likely to be not human enough."


"The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards."


"As a member of this court I am not justified in writing my private notions of policy into the Constitution, no matter how deeply I may cherish them or how mischievous I may deem their disregard."


"Freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of achieving a free society."


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

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


"Fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalized medium of reason, that's all we have standing between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feeling."

"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."


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

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

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

"Old age and sickness bring out the essential characteristics of a man."

"The mark of a truly civilized man is confidence in the strength and security derived from the inquiring mind."


-Felix Frankfurter