Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Quotes

136 Sourced Quotes

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.
When twenty years ago a vague terror went over the earth and the word socialism began to be heard, I thought and still think that fear was translated into doctrines that had no proper place in the Constitution or the common law. Judges are apt to be naif, simple-minded men, and they need something of Mephistopheles. We too need education in the obvious—to learn to transcend our own convictions and to leave room for much that we hold dear to be done away with short of revolution by the orderly change of law.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
It cannot be helped, it is as it should be, that the law is behind the times.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy — I don't disparage envy but I don't accept it as legitimately my master.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The minute a phrase becomes current it becomes an apology for not thinking accurately to the end of the sentence.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
A Constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory... It is made for people of fundamentally differing views, and the accident of our finding certain opinions natural and familiar, or novel, and even shocking, ought not to conclude our judgment upon the question whether statutes embodying them conflict with the Constitution of the United States.

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

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

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

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.
It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living.

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

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.
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.
The power to tax is not the power to destroy while this Court sits.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
As I grow older I grow calm. If I feel what are perhaps an old man's apprehensions, that competition from new races will cut deeper than working men's disputes and will test whether we can hang together or can fight.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
One of the eternal conflicts out of which life is made up is that between the effort of every man to get the most he can for his services, and that of society, disguised under the name of capital, to get his services for the least possible return.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our fathers have done them or our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a larger part than what we suspect of what we think.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
A good catchword can obscure analysis for fifty years.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The chief end of man is to frame general ideas—and…no general idea is worth a damn.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.