Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Quotes

136 Sourced Quotes

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.
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.
Yes, child of suffering, thou may'st well be sure He who ordained the Sabbath loves the poor!

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The Angel of Life winds them up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hand of the Angel of the Resurrection.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social Statics.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Courts are apt to err by sticking too closely to the words of a law where those words import a policy that goes beyond them.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Vanity is the most philosophical of those feelings that we are taught to despise. For vanity recognizes that if a man is in a minority of one we lock him up, and therefore longs for an assurance from others that one's work has not been in vain.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Do not be bullied out of your common sense by the specialist; two to one, he is a pedant.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The interpretation of constitutional principles must not be too literal. We must remember that the machinery of government would not work if it were not allowed a little play in its joints.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Great cases like hard cases make bad law. For great cases are called great, not by reason of their importance in shaping the law of the future, but because of some accident of immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings and distorts the judgement.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Free competition is worth more to society than it costs.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour upon it, the more it will contract.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
But I have long thought that if you knew a column of advertisements by heart, you could achieve unexpected felicities with them. You can get a happy quotation anywhere if you have the eye.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
I do not think the United States would come to an end if we lost our power to declare an Act of Congress void. I do think the Union would be imperiled if we could not make that declaration as to the laws of the several States.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Chicago sounds rough to the maker of verse. One comfort we have - Cincinnati sounds worse.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The reason why he wrote while standing up:
Nothing conduces to brevity like a caving in of the knees.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Now and then, an extraordinary case may turn up, but constitutional law, like other mortal contrivances, has to take some chances, and in the great majority of instances, no doubt, justice will be done.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
I recognize without hesitation that judges do and must legislate, but they can do so only interstitially; they are confined from molar to molecular motions.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it.

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.
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.
The riders in a race do not stop short when they reach the goal. There is a little finishing canter before coming to a standstill. There is time to hear the kind voice of friends and to say to one's self, The work is done.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
To allow opposition by speech seems to indicate that you think the speech impotent, as when a man says that he has squared the circle, or that you do not care whole-heartedly for the result, or that you doubt either your power or your premises. But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas —that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Our test of truth is a reference to either a present or an imagined future majority in favor of our view.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
We call those poets who are first to mark, Through earth's dull mist the coming of the dawn, Who see in twilight's gloom the first pale spark, While others only note that day is gone.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
As for us, our days of combat are over. Our swords are rust. Our guns will thunder no more. The vultures that once wheeled over our heads must be buried with their prey. Whatever of glory must be won in the council or the closet, never again in the field. I do not repine. We have shared the incommunicable experience of war; we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top.

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.