Felix Frankfurter Quotes

Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty.

Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by example. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.

Anyone who takes it upon himself ... to break a bad law, thereby authorizes everyone else to break the good ones.

Liberty unregulated by law becomes anarchy.

The first duty of a state is to provide for its own conservation. Until that point is secured, it can preserve and protect nothing else. But, if possible, it has greater interest in acting according to strict law than even the subject himself. For if the people see that the law is violated to crush them, they will certainly despise the law. They, or their party, will be easily led to violate it, whenever they can, by all the means in their power. Except in cases of direct war, whenever government abandons law, it proclaims anarchy.

Where the law of the majority ceases to be acknowledged, there government ends; the law of the strongest takes its place, and life and property are his who can take them.

The government has a responsibility to protect society, to help maintain society. That's why we have laws... The rule of law creates a set of standards for our behavior.

Laws made by common consent must not be trampled on by individuals.

NO LAW MEANS NO LAW!

To the laws all men show respect and deference, as without them peace and harmony would be supplanted by anarchy and terror; human laws being instituted for the express purpose of regulating our interests as individuals and nations, between man and man; and divine laws given of heaven, prescribing rules on spiritual concerns, for faith and worship

All power, all subordination to authority rests on the executioner …. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world and at that very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple and society disappears.

Lawlessness is lawlessness. Anarchy is anarchy is anarchy. Neither race nor color nor frustration is an excuse for either lawlessness or anarchy.

Law that is sufficiently complex is indistinguishable from lawlessness.

A government must govern, must prescribe and enforce laws within its sphere or cease to be a government. Moreover, the individual must be independent and free within his own sphere or cease to be an individual. The fundamental question ... is now, and always will be through what adjustments, by what actions, these principles may be applied.

I know no human being exempt from the law. The law is the security of the people of England; it is the security of every person that is governed, and of every person that governs.

He that is for a government of laws is for the government of God. And he that is for a government of man is for government of a beast.

All of us know that if an individual, a community, or a state is going continuously and successfully to defy the rulings of the courts, then anarchy results.

[D]emocracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man's life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few.

If one man can be allowed to determine for himself what is law, every man can. That means first chaos, then tyranny. Legal process is an essential part of the democratic process.

Once the law is broken with impunity, each man regains the right to any means he deems proper or necessary in order to defend himself against the new tyrant, the one who can break the law.

The moment that law is destroyed, liberty is lost, and men, left free to enter upon the domains of each other, destroy each other's rights, and invade the field of each other's liberty.

It's a strange thing, we think that law brings order. Law doesn't. How do we know that law does not bring order? Look around us. We live under the rule of law. Notice how much order we have?

Society is well governed when its people obey the magistrates, and the magistrates obey the law.

As soon as laws are necessary for men, they are no longer fit for freedom.

Whenever men take the law into their own hands, the loser is the law. And when the law loses, freedom languishes.