Quotes by
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. |
1841-1935 ,
American jurist and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1902 to 1932; he was often called "The Great Dissenter". He was the son of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
| 23 quotes | 2,743 visits |
Quotations
| • | State interference is an evil, where it cannot be shown to be a good. 4 |
| • | There is in all men a demand for the superlative, so much so that the poor devil who has no other way of reaching it attains it by getting drunk. 3 |
| • | The degree of civilization which a people has reached, no doubt, is marked by their anxiety to do as they would be done by. 3 |
| • | A good catchword can obscure analysis for fifty years. 2 |
| • | Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife. |
| • | A page of history is worth a volume of logic. |
| • | If I were dying, my last words would be, “Have faith and pursue the unknown end.” |
| • | Eloquence may set fire to reason. |
| • | Lawyers spend their professional careers shoveling smoke. |
| • | A second class mind, but a first class temperament. (his opinion of Theodore Roosevelt) |
| • | I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy. |
| • | Free competition is worth more to society than it costs. |
| • | The aim of the law is not to punish sins, but is to prevent certain external results. |
| • | Certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man. |
| • | The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books. |
| • | If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man. |
| • | Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society. |
| • | Constitutions are intended to preserve practical and substantial rights, not to maintain theories. |
| • | Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked. |
| • | Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum. |
| • | 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. |
| • | Young man, the secret of my success is that at an early age I discovered that I was not God. |
