Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Quotes

136 Sourced Quotes

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.
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.