Felix Frankfurter Quotes

Legal process is an essential part of the democratic process.

Our government depends upon the rule of law.

The rule of law bakes no bread, it is unable to distribute loaves or fishes (it has none), and it cannot protect itself against external assault, but it remains the most civilized and least burdensome conception of a state yet to be devised.

The rule of law does not guarantee freedom, since general law as well as personal edicts can be tyrannical. But increasing reliance on the rule of law clearly played a major role in transforming Western society from a world in which the ordinary citizen was literally subject to the arbitrary will of his master to a world in which the ordinary citizen could regard himself as his own master

The rule of law is the basis for any democracy. And without the rule of law in democracy, you have chaos.

We cannot build foundations of a state without rule of law.

Democracy is not possible without effectively working legal system.

In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.

The rule of law should be respected so that the basic structure of our democracy is maintained and further strengthened.

Democracy is morose, and runs to anarchy.

Our nation is founded on the principal that observance of the law is the eternal safeguard of liberty and defiance of the law is the surest road to tyranny.

The rule of law doesn't mean the police are in charge, but that we all answer to the same laws.

So long as we govern our nation by the letter and spirit of the Bill of Rights, we can be sure that our nation will grow in strength and wisdom and freedom.

The purpose of democracy - supplanting old belief in the necessary absoluteness of establish'd dynastic rulership, temporal, ecclesiastical, and scholastic, as furnishing the only security against chaos, crime, and ignorance - is, through many transmigrations, and amid endless ridicules, arguments, and ostensible failures

The worst law is better than bureaucratic tyranny.

Constitutional democracy has created astonishing and apparently irreversible social progress. All we're interested in is talking about when government doesn't work.

If liberty is worth keeping and free representative government worth saving, we must stand for all American fundamentals-not some, but all. All are woven into the great fabric of our national well-being. We cannot hold fast to some only, and abandon others that, for the moment, we find inconvenient. If one American fundamental is prostrated, others in the end will surely fall.

No, I think that we've got a basic discrepancy here between the rule of law versus the rule of man.

Societies cannot move forward without law, and our constitution is the cornerstone of the law and our National Assembly is its umbrella and fortress.

Yes, people need food and education. But one of the cornerstones of any society is a well-functioning legal system.

Rule of law is the most important element in any civil society.

If one man can be allowed to determine for himself what is law, every man can. That means first chaos, then tyranny.

If the prosecution of crime is to be conducted with so little regard for that protection which centuries of English law have given to the individual, we are indeed at the dawn of a new era; and much that we have deemed vital to our liberties, is a delusion.

A [legal] code is almost the only blessing, perhaps it is the only blessing, which absolute governments are better fitted to confer on a nation than popular governments.

We're a country of rule of law, and rule of law doesn't move fast, especially in an entity as big the U.S. government.