Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Quotes

136 Sourced Quotes

I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience... The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
I confess that I do not understand the principle on which the power to fix a minimum for the wages of women can be denied by those who admit the power to fix a maximum for their hours of work. I fully assent to the proposition that here as elsewhere the distinctions of the law are distinctions of degree, but I perceive no difference in the kind or degree of interference with liberty, the only matter with which we have any concern, between the one case and the other. The bargain is equally affected whichever half you regulate…. It will need more than the Nineteenth Amendment to convince me that there are no differences between men and women, or that legislation cannot take those differences into account.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Upon this point, a page of history is worth a volume of logic.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
State interference is an evil, where it cannot be shown to be a good.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The last thing an old teacher wants is, as you know full well, a new set of terms for a familiar set of objects. It is hard instructing ancient canine individuals in new devices. It is hard teaching old professors new tricks.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Take your needle, my child, and work at your pattern; it will come out a rose by and by. Life is like that - one stitch at a time taken patiently and the pattern will come out all right like the embroidery.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
I say to you in all sadness of conviction, that to think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Consciously or unconsciously we all strive to make the kind of a world that we like.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
But if we are to yield to fashionable conventions, it seems to me that theaters are as much devoted to public use as anything well can be. We have not that respect for art that is one of the glories of France. But to many the superfluous is the necessary, and it seems to me that Government does not go beyond its sphere in attempting to make life livable for them.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Most men think dramatically, not quantitatively, a fact that the rich would be wise to remember more than they do. We are apt to contrast the palace with the hovel, the dinner at Sherry's with the workingman's pail, and never ask how much or realize how little is withdrawn to make the prizes of success. (Subordinate prizes — since the only prize much cared for by the powerful is power. The prize of the general is not a bigger tent, but command.)

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
A second-class intellect. But a first-class temperament!
Of Franklin Roosevelt

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Some of her answers might excite popular prejudice, but if there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The common law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky, but the articulate voice of some sovereign or quasi sovereign that can be identified; although some decisions with which I have disagreed seem to me to have forgotten the fact.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Life is a roar of bargain and battle, but in the very heart of it there rises a mystic spiritual tone that gives meaning to the whole. It transmutes the dull details into romance. It reminds us that our only but wholly adequate significance is as parts of the unimaginable whole. It suggests that even while living we are living to ends outside ourselves

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Deep-seated preferences cannot be argued about — you cannot argue a man into liking a glass of beer — and therefore, when differences are sufficiently far reaching, we try to kill the other man rather than let him have his way. But that is perfectly consistent with admitting that, so far as appears, his grounds are just as good as ours.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Sweet is the scene where genial friendship plays the pleasing game of interchanging praise.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Whatever comes from the brain carries the hue of the place it came from, and whatever comes from the heart carries the heat and color of its birthplace.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The elaborate argument against the constitutionality of the Act if interpreted as we read it, in accordance with its obvious meaning does not need an elaborate answer.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
One has to try to strike the jugular and let the rest go.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
A river is more than an amenity, it is a treasure. It offers a necessity of life that must be rationed among those who have power over it.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The law, so far as it depends on learning, is indeed, as it has been called, the government of the living by the dead. To a very considerable extent no doubt it is inevitable that the living should be so governed. The past gives us our vocabulary and fixes the limits of our imagination; we cannot get away from it. There is, too, a peculiar logical pleasure in making manifest the continuity between what we are doing and what has been done before. But the present has a right to govern itself so far as it can; and it ought always to be remembered that historic continuity with the past is not a duty, it is only a necessity.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Fresh air and innocence are good if you don't take too much of them — but I always remember that most of the achievements and pleasures of life are in bad air.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Stillness of person and steadiness of features are signal marks of good breeding.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.