“Yet the whole structure of the common law is an obvious denial of this theory; it stands as a monument slowly raised, like a coral reef, from the minute accretions of past individuals, of whom each built upon the relics which his predecessors left, and in his turn left a foundation upon which his successors might work.”
Book Review, 35 Harv. L. Rev. 479, 479 (1922) (reviewing Benjamin N. Cardozo's The Nature of the Judicial Process).
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Learned Hand 56
American legal scholar, Court of Appeals judge 1872–1961Related quotes
Source: How we're growing baby corals to rebuild reefs https://www.ted.com/talks/kristen_marhaver_how_we_re_growing_baby_corals_to_rebuild_reefs (October 2015)

Source: The Social Function of Science (1939), p. 415-416. Chapter XVI. THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF SCIENCE. The Transformation of Science

“We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet's difference from his predecessors”
Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)
Context: We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet's difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. And I do not mean the impressionable period of adolescence, but the period of full maturity.

The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)

Source: Seth, Dreams & Projections of Consciousness, (1986), p. 314, quoting from Session 438
“The whole landscape flashes while the hero now wraps about his body the fleece with its starry tufts of hair, now shifts it to his neck, now folds it upon his left arm.”
Micat omnis ager villisque comantem
sidereis totos pellem nunc fundit in artus,
nunc in colla refert, nunc implicat ille sinistrae.
Source: Argonautica, Book VIII, Lines 122–124