Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Quotes

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

Certitude leads to violence. This is a proposition that has an easy application and a difficult one. The easy application is to ideoologues, dogmatists, and bullies--people who think that their rigtness justifies them in imposing on anyone who does not happen to suscribe to their particular ideology, dogma or notion of turf. If the conviction of rightness is powerful enough, resistance to it will be met, sooner or later by force. There are people like this in every sphere of life, and it is natural to feel that the world would be a better place without them!

Success. Is not the position where you are standing, but which direction you are going.

This is a court of law, not a court of justice.

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.

My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins.

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?

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

Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

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.

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

Certitude is not the test of certainty.

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.

People talk fundamentals and superlatives and then make some changes of detail.

Fame is the scentless sunflower, with gaudy crown of gold; But friendship is the rose, with sweets in every fold.

The character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done.

If you can eat sawdust without butter, you can be a success in the law.

Reason means truth and those who are not governed by it take the chance that someday the sunken fact will rip the bottom out of their boat.

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

The provisions of the Constitution are not mathematical formulas having their essence in their form; they are organic, living institutions transplanted from English soil. Their significance is vital, not formal; it is to be gathered not simply by taking the words and a dictionary, but by considering their origin and the line of their growth.

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.

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.

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.

Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children.

There is no friend like the old friend, who has shared our morning days, No greeting like his welcome, no homage like his praise: Fame is the scentless sunflower, with gaudy crown of gold; But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold.

A river is more than an amenity, it is a treasure.

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

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

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.

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

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 its birth. The only difference between the expression of an opinion and an incitement is the speaker's enthusiasm for the result.

There was never an idea started that woke up men out of their stupid indifference but its originator was spoken of as a crank.

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

Liberty is often a heavy burden on a man. It involves the necessity for perpetual choice which is the kind of labor men have always dreaded.

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

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.

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.

No generalization is wholly true—not even this one.

I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it, but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.

Old age is fifteen years older than I am.

While we've youth in our hearts, we can never grow old.

The mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort.

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

We are all sentenced to capital punishment for the crime of living, and though the condemned cell of our earthly existence is but a narrow and bare dwelling-place, we have adjusted ourselves to it, and made it tolerably comfortable for the little while we are to be confined in it.

Man has will, but woman has her way.

There is no time like the old time, when you and I were young!

Apologizing - a very desperate habit - one that is rarely cured. Apology is only egotism wrong side out.

Eloquence may set fire to reason.

Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.

The greatest act of faith is when a man understands he is not God.