Time & Perspective Quote by Felix Frankfurter

Liberty, Frankfurter reminds us, is not born in candlelit seminars or saintly consensus; it’s hammered out in ugly cases with lousy protagonists. That’s not cynicism for its own sake. It’s a judge’s realism about how constitutional protections actually get tested: not when everyone agrees who deserves sympathy, but when the defendant is odious, the speaker is inflammatory, the organization is suspect, the accusation sounds plausible. The “not very nice people” line is doing the real work here, puncturing the comforting myth that rights expand through moral progress alone. They expand through conflict, often against public appetite.

The subtext is a warning aimed at the respectable. If you only defend due process, free speech, or equal protection when the beneficiary is likable, you don’t believe in rights; you believe in rewards. Frankfurter’s phrasing also smuggles in an institutional argument about courts: their legitimacy comes from resisting the crowd’s urge to make exceptions. The moment you carve out “obvious” villains, the exception metastasizes, and the safeguard becomes a permission slip for power.

Context matters because Frankfurter, a Supreme Court Justice associated with judicial restraint, wasn’t a romantic about the Court heroically saving the day. He’s pointing to a messier American pattern: controversies become the crucible where doctrine hardens. The line captures the uncomfortable engine of civil liberties jurisprudence: the Constitution’s strongest protections often owe their clarity to people the nation would rather forget, but cannot, because their cases force the country to choose between principle and preference.