Felix FrankfurterThinkers

A Clean desk is a sign of an empty mind.

The Constitution of the US is not to be the sport of shifting winds of doctrine, for it is a document whose content was deemed to be of so fundamental a nature to endure for all times.

The Court is independent form the public will. The court which yields to the popular will thereby licenses itself to despotism, for there can be no assurance that it will not, on another occasion, indulge its own will.

The Court is, at root, essentially all about semantics, because words are the tools with which one works, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written, and thus everything upon whuich our understanding of them depends.

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

The Due-Process Clause is a clause that precisely forbids a State licensing agency to lay bare its arbitrary action, or forbids State law from explicitly allowing it to act arbitrarily.

Freedom is an unremitting endeavor, never a final achievement.

Freedom of expression is the well-spring of our civilization for the history of civilization is in considerable measure the displacement of error which once held sway as official truth by beliefs which in turn have yielded to other truths.

Freedom of speech is essential to the enlightenment of a free people and in restraining those who wield power.

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

Government is itself an art, one of the subtlest of the arts, the art of making men live together in peace and with reasonable happiness.