Time & Perspective Quote by Learned Hand

Hand is doing something slyly radical for a judge: admitting that the bench, like the rest of life, runs on educated guesswork. Coming from Learned Hand, the great apostle of judicial restraint, the line reads less like a motivational poster and more like a warning label on the human condition. We prefer to imagine that decisions are the product of complete records and airtight logic. Hand punctures that fantasy with a lawyerly phrase - "insufficient data" - that sounds clinical but lands as existential. The world is a messy evidentiary file, always missing key pages.

The subtext is a defense of action under uncertainty, aimed at people who fetishize certainty as a moral virtue. Hand frames doubt as both necessary and potentially tyrannical: necessary because good judgment depends on skepticism, tyrannical because endless qualification becomes its own form of negligence. "Run down all our doubts" has the cadence of cross-examination, a chase that can go on forever if you let it. Meanwhile, time - indifferent, irreversible - "would flow past us". The metaphor quietly shifts from courtroom procedure to the river of life, reminding you that delay is not neutral; it carries a cost.

Context matters: Hand lived through industrial capitalism, two world wars, and the growth of the modern administrative state, eras when institutions had to act fast with imperfect information. His intent is pragmatic and ethical at once: embrace provisional decisions, stay humble about their foundations, and accept that responsibility includes choosing before certainty arrives.