Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Quotes

136 Sourced Quotes

If a thing has been practised for two hundred years by common consent, it will need a strong case for the Fourteenth Amendment to affect it.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
What refuge is there for the victim who is oppressed with the feeling that there are a thousand new books he ought to read, while life is only long enough for him to attempt to read a hundred?

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Nature has but one judgment on wrong conduct — if you can call that a judgment which seemingly has no reference to conduct as such — the judgment of death.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The rule of joy and the law of duty seem to me all one.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which such knowledge enables him to predict, not as a good one, who finds his reasons for conduct, whether inside the law or outside of it, in the vaguer sanctions of conscience.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The aim of the law is not to punish sins, but is to prevent certain external results.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
See how he throws his baited lines about,/And plays his men as anglers play their trout.

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.
What we most want to ask of our Maker is an unfolding of the divine purpose in putting human beings into conditions in which such numbers of them would be sure to go wrong.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The truth is that the whole system of beliefs which comes in with the story of the fall of man... is gently falling out of enlightened human intelligence.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The year is getting to feel rich, for his golden fruits are ripening fast, and he has a large balance in the barns, which are his banks. The members of his family have found out that he is well to do in the world. September is dressing herself in show of dahlias and splendid marigolds and starry zinnias. October, the extravagant sister, has ordered an immense amount of the most gorgeous forest tapestry for her grand reception.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The sea drowns out humanity and time. It has no sympathy with either, for it belongs to eternity; and of that it sings its monotonous song forever and ever.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
To an imagination of any scope the most far reaching form of power is not money, it is the command of ideas

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
When one thinks coldly I see no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or to a grain of sand.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Me wretched! Let me curr to quercine shades!
Effund your albid hausts, lactiferous maids!
O, might I vole to some umbrageous clump,--
Depart,--be off,--excede,--evade,--erump!

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 law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
And if I should live to be
The last leaf upon the tree
In the spring,
Let them smile, as I do now,
At the old forsaken bough
Where I cling.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Men must turn square corners when they deal with the Government.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time.

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.
The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree. When a nation is at war many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
I like to pay taxes. With them I buy civilization.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living.

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.
One has to try to strike the jugular and let the rest go.

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.
Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.