“It would be a narrow conception of jurisprudence to confine the notion of 'laws' to what is found written on the statute books, and to disregard the gloss which life has written upon it.”
Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis Railway. v. Browning, 310 U.S. 362, 369 (1940).
Judicial opinions
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Felix Frankfurter 67
American judge 1882–1965Related quotes
Response to a would be biographer in 1980, as quoted in "When Stephen met Sylvia" in The Guardian (24 April 2004) http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1201328,00.html
Context: I am very honoured by your wanting to write a life of me. But the fact is I regard my life as rather a failure in the only thing in which I wanted it to succeed. I have not written the books I ought to have written and I have written a lot of books I should not have written. My life as lived by me has been interesting to me but to write truthfully about it would probably cause much pain to people close to me — and I always feel that the feelings of the living are more important than the monuments of the dead.
Source: The Final Testament of the Holy Bible
“What worthwhile book after the Pentateuch has been written by a committee?”
Source: Real Presences (1989), I: A Secondary City, Ch. 6 (p. 36).
Fragment No. 104; on Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).
Blüthenstaub (1798)
Plato, 51.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 3: Plato
Source: A Room of One's Own (1929), Ch. 2, p. 26
Trash, Violence, and Versace: But Is It Art? http://www.city-journal.org/html/8_1_urbanities-trash.html (Winter 1998).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms