Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr Quotes

I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.

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

The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract.

A child's education should begin at least 100 years before he was born.

A mind that is stretched by new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.

I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy.

The man of action has the present, but the thinker controls the future.

We have shared the incommunicable experience of war, we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top. In our youth our hearts were touched with fire.

A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in colour and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.

Every calling is great when greatly pursued.

Don’t flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.

We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.

We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep to the real and the true.

To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.

The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.

Most people are willing to take the Sermon on the Mount as a flag to sail under, but few will use it as a rudder by which to steer.

If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I wouldn't pass it around. Wouldn't be doing anybody a favor. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't say embrace trouble. That's as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say, meet it as a friend, for you'll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it.

The first requirement of a sound body of law is, that it should correspond with the actual feelings and demands of the community, whether right or wrong.

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.

Between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force.

Greatness is not in where we stand but in what direction we are moving. We must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it—but sail we must and not drift, nor lie at anchor.

Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.

Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.

Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief and if believed it is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at birth. Eloquence may set fire to reason.

The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins.

We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of superstitious fears which were implanted in his imagination, no matter how utterly his reason may reject them.

Every year, if not every day, we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge.

Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.

Young man, the secret of my success is that at an early age I discovered that I was not God.

Every man has a right to do what he wills, provided he interferes not with a like right on the part of his neighbors.

I believe that there are no innate, intrinsic differences among a human being , a baboon or a grain of sand.

A man who called everyone a damn fool is like a man who damns the weather. He only shows that he is not adapted to his environment, not that the environment is wrong.

I detest a man who knows that he knows.

If my fellow citizens want to go to Hell I will help them. Its my job.

A goose flies by a chart the Royal Geographic Society could not improve.

We have to choose, and for my part I think it a less evil that some criminals should escape than that the government should play an ignoble part.

The very minute a thought is threatened with publicity it seems to shrink towards mediocrity.

Those who honestly mean to be true contradict themselves more rarely than those who try to be consistent. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES JR., AMERICAN JURIST   So

The only simplicity for which I would give a straw is that which is on the other side of the complex—not that which never has divined it. —OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES JR.39

noted American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said that, to be safe, laws must be drafted with the “bad man” in mind, not the good.

We believed that it was most desirable that the North should win, we believed in the principle that the Union is indissoluable, we, or many of us at least, also believed that the conflict was inevitable, and that slavery had lasted long enough. But we equally believed that those who stood against us held just as sacred conviction that were the opposite of ours, and we respected them as every men with a heart must respect those who give all for their belief.

The rational study of law is still to a large extent the study of history. History must be a part of the study, because without it we cannot know the precise scope of rules which it is our business to know.

It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

For I say to you in all the sadness of conviction, that to think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists. Only when you have worked alone – when you have felt around you a black gulf of solitude more isolating than that which surrounds the dying man, and in hope and in despair have trusted to your own unshaken will – then only will you have achieved. Thus only can you gain the secret isolated joy of the thinker, who knows that, a hundred years after he is dead and forgotten, men who have never heard of him will be moving to the measure of his thought – the subtle rapture of a postponed power, which the world knows not because it has no external trappings, but which to his prophetic vision is more real than that which commands an army.

We are very quiet there, but it is the quiet of a storm centre. .

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.

A new untruth is better than an old truth.

Beware how you take hope from another human being. - Oliver Wendell Holms Jr.,

Academic life is but half life it is a withdrawal from the fight to utter smart things that cost you nothing except the thinking them from a cloister.

The great thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are moving.

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. “Most of my time is spent in doing as well as I can the work immediately at hand. One hopes that by doing quietly and without parade as solid work as one can when one is occupied, one makes the best contribution possible to one's state.

Much later, I discovered Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr’s wonderful remark about Experience and Nature: “Although Dewey’s book is incredibly ill-written, it seemed to me … to have a feeling of intimacy with the universe that I found unequaled. So methought God would have spoken had He been inarticulate but keenly desirous to tell you how it was.

Pretty much all law consists in forbidding men to do something that they want to do.

Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

Freedom of expression matters most where the expression in question is unpopular: if it is to mean anything, it must mean ‘freedom for the thought that we hate.

A page of history is worth a pound of logic.

The petitioner may have a constitutional right to talk politics, but he has no constitutional right to be a policeman.

Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.” —Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

The only simplicity for which I would give a straw is that which is on the other side of the complex—not that which never has divined it. —OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, JR. There

Even a dog knows the difference between being stumbled over and being kicked.   Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said, “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.

Man’s mind, stretched by a new idea, never goes back to its old dimensions.” —OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES JR.

Even a dog knows the difference between being stumbled over and being kicked. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.

The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race. The practice of it, in spite of popular jests, tends to make good citizens and good men.

Most of my time is spent in doing as well as I can the work immediatekt at hand. One hopes that by doing quietly and with parade as solid work as one can when one is occupied, on makes the best contribution possible to one's state.

Most of my time is spent in doing as well as I can the work immediately at hand. One hopes that by doing quietly and without parade as solid work as one can when one is occupied, one makes the best contribution possible to one's state.

On July 11, Lincoln appeared at Fort Stevens, north of Washington, which was under fire from Early’s men. To soothe an alarmed populace, Lincoln and Stanton rode there in an open carriage. The tall, angular president, peeping over the fort’s parapet, made a prime target for Confederate marksmen, and one Union soldier (possibly Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.), unaware it was Lincoln, shouted, “Get down, you fool.”13 It was the only time in American history a sitting president came under fire in combat.

But, nevertheless, the generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its experience. Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.

The spectacle takes us away from our routines. For at least a time, we feel part of something big, colorful, exciting. It is perhaps understandable that civilians are often more enthusiastic during wartime than soldiers who have experienced battle. The soldiers know that war is often boring and dirty as well as terrifying and colorful. Even so, after some years, an old soldier like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., could brush aside his earlier description of the pain, boredom, and death of war and declare that “its message was divine.” The stench disappears, but the spectacle remains in memory’s eye.

One of the finest definitions of happiness in literature is that given by Oliver Wendell Holmes. "Happiness," said the Autocrat, "is four feet on the fender." When his beloved wife was gone, and an old friend came in to condole with him, he said, shaking his gray head, "Only two feet on the fender now.

Law, being a practical thing, must found itself on actual forces. It is quite enough, therefore, for the law, that man, by an instinct which he shares with the domestic dog, and of which the seal gives a most striking example, will not allow himself to be dispossessed, either by force or fraud, of what he olds, without trying to get it back again. Philosophy may find a hundred reasons to justify the instinct, but it would be totally immaterial if it should condemn it and bid us surrender without a murmur.

Certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.

State interference is an evil, where it cannot be shown to be a good.

The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law.

The only simplicity for which I would give a straw is that which is on the other side of the complex — not that which never has divined it.

Remember, my friend, that every good costs something. Don’t forget that to have anything means to go without something else. Even to be a person, to be this means to be not that.

The customs, beliefs, or needs of a primitive time establish a rule or a formula. In the course of centuries the custom, belief, or necessity disappears, but the rule remains.

Why can't somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks?

The great act of faith is when a man decides that he is not God.

I do not know the meaning of the universe. But in the midst of doubt, in the collapse of creed, there is one thing I do not doubt and that is that the faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands, in a plan or campaign of which he has no notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use.

[I]t might seem that the law of life is . . . that man should produce food and raiment in order that he might produce yet other food and other raiment to the end of time. Yet who does not rebel at that conclusion?

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.

My old formula is that a man should be an enthusiast in the front of his head and a sceptic in the back. Do his damndest without believing that the cosmos would collapse if he failed. One should have the same courage for failure that many have for death.

The substance of the law at any given time pretty nearly corresponds, so far as it goes, with what is then understood to be convenient; but its form and machinery, and the degree to which it is able to work out desired results, depend very much upon its past.

I have never heard anyone profess indifference to a boat race. Why should you row a boat race? Why endure long months of pain in preparation of a fierce half hour, or even six minutes, that will leave you all but dead? Does anyone ask the question? Is there anyone who would not go through all its costs, and more, for the moment when anguish breaks into triumph - or even for the glory of having nobly lost? Is life less than a boat race? If a man will give all the blood in his body to win the one, will he not spend all the might of his soul to prevail in the other?

I look at man through Malthus's glasses –as like flies– here swept away by pestilence – there multiplying unduly and paying for it. I think morals are not the last word but only a check for varying intensity upon force, which seems to me likely to remain the ultimate as far as I can look ahead.

The joy of life is living, is to put out all one's powers as far as they will go; that the measure of power is obstacle overcome; to ride boldly at what is in front of you, be it fence or enemy; to pray, not for comfort, but for combat; to keep the soldier's faith against the doubts of civil life, more besetting and harder to overcome than all the misgivings of the battle-field, and to remember that duty is not to be proved in the evil day, but then to be obeyed unquestioning; to love glory than the temptations of wallowing ease, but to know that one's final judge and only rival is oneself: with all our failures in act and thought, these things we learned from noble enemies in Virginia or Georgia or on the Mississippi, thirty years ago; these things we believe to be true.

Leaving the criminal law on one side, what is the difference between the liability under the mill acts or statutes authorizing a taking by eminent domain and the liability for what we call a wrongful conversion of property where restoration is out of the question. In both cases the party taking another man's property has to pay its fair value as assessed by a jury, and no more. What significance is there in calling one taking right and another wrong from the point of view of the law?

Law, being a practical thing, must found itself on actual forces. It is quite enough, therefore, for the law, that man, by an instinct which he shares with the domestic dog, and of which the seal gives a most striking example, will not allow himself to be dispossessed, either by force or fraud, of what he holds, without trying to get it back again. Philosophy may find a hundred reasons to justify the instinct, but it would be totally immaterial if it should condemn it and bid us surrender without a murmur.

[A] constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory, whether of paternalism and the organic relation of the citizen to the State or of laissez faire. 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. . . . [T]he word liberty in the Fourteenth Amendment is perverted when it is held to prevent the natural outcome of a dominant opinion, unless it can be said that a rational and fair man necessarily would admit that the statute proposed would infringe fundamental principles as they have been understood by the traditions of our people and our law.

Your remark about the “oughts” and system of values in political science leaves me rather cold. If as I think, the values are simply generalizations emotionally expressed, the generalizations are matters for the same science as other observations of fact. If as I sometimes suspect, you believe in some transcendental sanction, I don't. Of course, different people, and especially different races, differ in their values―but those differences are matters of fact and I have no respect for them except my general respect for what exists. Man is an idealizing animal―and expresses his ideals (values) in the conventions of his time. I have very little respect for the conventions in themselves, but respect and generally try to observe those of my own environment as the transitory expression of an eternal fact. . .

Over the next year, he practiced every day. In his diary, he wrote as if his control over himself and his choices was never in question. He got married. He started teaching at Harvard. He began spending time with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who would go on to become a Supreme Court justice, and Charles Sanders Peirce, a pioneer in the study of semiotics, in a discussion group they called the Metaphysical Club.9.30 Two years after writing his diary entry, James sent a letter to the philosopher Charles Renouvier, who had expounded at length on free will. “I must not lose this opportunity of telling you of the admiration and gratitude which have been excited in me by the reading of your Essais,” James wrote. “Thanks to you I possess for the first time an intelligible and reasonable conception of freedom.… I can say that through that philosophy I am beginning to experience a rebirth of the moral life; and I can assure you, sir, that this is no small thing.” Later, he would famously write that the will to believe is the most important ingredient in creating belief in change. And that one of the most important methods for creating that belief was habits. Habits, he noted, are what allow us to “do a thing with difficulty the first time, but soon do it more and more easily, and finally, with sufficient practice, do it semi-mechanically, or with hardly any consciousness at all.” Once we choose who we want to be, people grow “to the way in which they have been exercised, just as a sheet of paper or a coat, once creased or folded, tends to fall forever afterward into the same identical folds.” If you believe you can change—if you make it a habit—the change becomes real. This is the real power of habit: the insight that your habits are what you choose them to be. Once that choice occurs—and becomes automatic—it’s not only real, it starts to seem inevitable, the thing, as James wrote, that bears “us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., lauded as a great legal philosopher and jurist of that time, was one of those jurists seeking a way to free mankind from the legal constraints imposed by a Creator. Holmes began arguing in his 1881 book, The Common Law, that the only source of law, properly speaking, is a judicial decision enforced by the State. In other words, judges, not God, should say what the law is. Holmes and other leading jurists and legal scholars argued throughout the second half of the 19th century for a radical new approach to the law, a legal system in which judges would not discover Divine law, as was previously assumed under common law principles, but would actually formulate the law themselves by evolving it, case by case, over time. Judges would then be free to move the law in any direction they determined would improve a progressive and evolving society.

Understanding human agency and human accountability, a cardinal feature of the law is understanding the active sense of foraging for some coherence

In Massachusetts today, while, on the one hand, there are a great many rules which are quite sufficiently accounted for by their manifest good sense, on the other, there are some which can only be understood by reference to the infancy of procedure among the German tribes, or to the social condition of Rome under the Decemvirs.

Even a dog knows the difference between being stumbled over and being kicked.

Even a dog knows he difference between being stumbled over and being kicked.

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. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.