Felix Frankfurter Quotes

The connections I draw between human nature and political systems in my new book, for example, were prefigured in the debates during the Enlightenment and during the framing of the American Constitution.

You can't be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet.

Only the unloved hate; the unloved and the unnatural.

Man is by nature a political animal.

Sometimes the beauty is easy. Sometimes you don't have to try at all. Sometimes you can hear the wind blow in a handshake. Sometimes there's poetry written right on the bathroom wall.

It is impossible to love and to be wise.

The democratic aspiration is no mere recent phase in human history ... It was written in Magna Carta..

We have come from the divine right of kings to the divine right of the governed.

It’s very basic in the Bill of Rights, he says. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, whether the majority agrees with them or not. Rights are in some sense anti-democratic; to trumpet democracy as the all-important value is to denigrate them.”

We are talking about an issue with fundamental significance to how democracies work. One can safely say it is now an even bigger issue.

Nobody expects democracy to be efficient--individual freedom was the primary purpose of our founders - but it should function at least a little

The real democratic idea is, not that every man shall be on a level with every other, but that every one shall have liberty, without hindrance, to be what God made him.

The liberties, franchises, and privileges of parliament are the ancient and undoubted birth-right and inheritance of the subjects of England.

If my fellow citizens want to go to Hell I will help them. It's my job.

The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference and undernourishment.

… the origin of all civil government, justly established, must be a voluntary compact, between the rulers and the ruled; and must be liable to such limitations, as are necessary for the security of the absolute rights of the latter; for what original title can any man or set of men have, to govern others, except their own consent?

The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.

Anyone who wants to have a perfect democracy is dreaming.

no law can be made, nor money raised, but by the people's consent …. That the rights and freedoms of England (the best and largest in Europe) shall be in force there

The people of [a] country [who have] never been in the habit of self-government [will] not [be] in the habit of acknowledging that fundamental law of nature by which alone self-government can be exercised by a society, I mean the lex majoris partis. Of the sacredness of this law, our countrymen are impressed from their cradle so that with them it is almost innate. This single circumstance may possibly decide the fate of [a country.]

ALL lawful authority, legislative, and executive, originates from the people. Power in the people is like light in the sun, native, original, inherent and unlimited by any thing human.

Democracies have been, and governments called, free; but the spirit of independence and the consciousness of inalienable rights, were never before transfused into the minds of a whole people.

A true democracy has never existed, and never will exist. It is against natural order that the great number should govern and that the few should be governed.

Zaire's one-party system is the most elaborate form of democracy

Western democracy included individual liberty, as well as equality. The frontiersman was impatient of restraints. He knew how to preserve order, even in the absence of legal authority…. the individual was not ready to submit to complex regulations. Population was sparse, there was no multitude of jostling interests, as in older settlements, demanding an elaborate system of personal restraints. Society became atomic. There was a reproduction of the primitive idea of the personality of the law, a crime was more an offense against the victim than a violation of the law of the land.