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A phrase begins life as a literary expression; its felicity leads to its lazy repetition; and repetition soon establishes it as a legal formula, undiscriminatingly used to express different and sometimes contradictory ideas.

— Felix Frankfurter

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More quotes by Felix Frankfurter

The indispensable judicial requisite is intellectual humility.

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

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

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

To be effective, judicial administration must not be leaden-footed.

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Felix Frankfurter (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.