Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Quotes - Page 3

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• I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Country, Believe, Thinking

  "Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S., 630". Dissenting opinion, November 10, 1919.

  72 Copy quote

• There is a little plant called reverence in the corner of my soul's garden, which I love to have watered once a week.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Love, Garden, Soul

  35 Copy quote

• 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.

  Passion, Equality, Envy

  "Holmes-Laski Letters: The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Harold J. Laski, 1916 - 1935". Book by Mark De Wolfe Howe, Volume 2, p. 942, 1953.

  6 Copy quote

• Why should you row a boat race? Why endure the long months of pain in preparation for a fierce half hour that will leave you all but dead? Does anyone ask the question? Is there anyone who would not go through all the 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 the blood in his body to win the one, will he spend all the might of his soul to prevail in the other?

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Pain, Winning, Men

  84 Copy quote

• Deep-seated preferences cannot be argued about - you cannot argue a man into liking a glass of beer.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Beer, Men, Glasses

  "Natural Law". Harvard Law Review, 1918.

  7 Copy quote

• We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Certainty, Has Beens, Certitude

  Harvard Law Review Natural Law Volume 32, Number 1, November 1918 (p. 40)

  10 Copy quote

• 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.

  Life, Atheism, Had Enough

  Speech to Bar Association of Boston, Boston, Mass., 7 Mar. 1900

  12 Copy quote

• 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.

  Race, Moral Development, Law

  Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (2009). “The Path of the Law”, p.6, The Floating Press

  8 Copy quote

• The root of joy, as of duty, is to put all one's powers towards some great end.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Roots, Joy, Ends

  28 Copy quote

• Be willing to commit yourself to a course, perhaps a long and hard one, without being able to foresee exactly where you will come out.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Long, Able, Commit

  16 Copy quote

• [The Constitution] is an experiment as all life is an experiment.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Life, Science, Constitution

  4 Copy quote

• General propositions do not decide concrete cases. The decision will depend on a judgment or intuition more subtle than any articulate major premise.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Decision, Intuition, Judgment

  9 Copy quote

• I think it not improbable that man, like the grub that prepares a chamber for the winged thing it never has seen but is to be - that man may have cosmic destinies that he does not understand.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Destiny, Men, Thinking

  "Law and the Court". Speech at a dinner of the Harvard Law School Association of New York, library.law.harvard.edu. February 15, 1913.

  24 Copy quote

• The language of judicial decision is mainly the language of logic. And the logical method and form flatter that longing for certainty and for repose which is in every human mind. But certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Men, Destiny, Decision

  "The Path of the Law" (1897)

  33 Copy quote

• Blood is a destiny. One's genius descends in the stream from long lines of ancestry.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Destiny, Blood, Long

  6 Copy quote

• But the moment you turn a corner you see another straight stretch ahead and there comes some further challenge to your ambition.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Perseverance, Stay Strong, Ambition

  10 Copy quote

• Our dead brothers and sisters still live for us and bid us think of life, not death-of life to which in their youth they lent the passion and glory of Spring. As I listen, the great chorus of life and joy begins again, and amid the awful orchestra of seen and unseen powers and destinies of good and evil, our trumpets sound once more a note of daring, hope, and will.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Death, Brother, Spring

  43 Copy quote

• Reason may be the lever, but sentiment gives you the fulcrum and the place to stand on if you want to move the world.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Moving, Giving, World

  45 Copy quote

• The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas [and] the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Acceptance, Ideas, Competition

  Abrams v. United States (dissenting opinion) (1919)

  8 Copy quote

• No generalization is wholly true—not even this one.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Generalization

  Quoted in Owen Wister, Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship (1930)

  24 Copy quote

• To us who remain behind is left this day of memories. Every year--in the full tide of spring, at the height of the symphony of flowers and love and life--there comes a pause, and through the silence we hear the lonely pipe of death.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Lonely, Memories, Life And Love

  39 Copy quote

• We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Tattoo, Tribes, Records

  "The Poet at the Breakfast Table". Book by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., 1872.

  12 Copy quote

• But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe...that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market... That at any rate is the theory of our constitution.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Truth, Believe, Fighting

  Abrams v. United States (dissenting opinion) (1919)

  15 Copy quote

• For my part I think it is a less evil that some criminals should escape, than that the government should play an ignoble part.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Thinking, Government, Play

  Olmstead v. United States (dissenting opinion) (1928)

  35 Copy quote

• We expect more of ourselves than we have any right to.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Acceptance, Expectations

  9 Copy quote

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