Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841 – 1935)
American jurist; Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1902 to 1932; often called "The Great Dissenter"; son of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
There is no friend like an old friend who has shared our morning days, no greeting like his welcome, no homage like his praise.
A river is more than an amenity, it is a treasure. It offers a necessity of life that must be rationed among those who have power over it.
Life is a roar of bargain and battle, but in the very heart of it there rises a mystic spiritual tone that gives meaning to the whole. It transmutes the dull details into romance. It reminds is that our only but wholly adequate significance is as parts of the unimaginable whole. It suggests that even while living we are living to ends outside ourselves
The general rule, at least, is that while property may be regulated to a certain extent, if regulation goes too far it will be recognized as a taking.
Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.
If I were dying, my last words would be, Have faith and pursue the unknown end.
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.
The power to tax is not the power to destroy while this Court sits.
The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.
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.
Young man, the secret of my success is that at an early age I discovered that I was not God.
A man's mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions.
One has to try to strike the jugular and let the rest go.
It is now the moment when by common consent we pause to become conscious of our national life and to rejoice in it, to recall what our country has done for each of us, and to ask ourselves what we can do for the country in return.
The law, so far as it depends on learning, is indeed, as it has been called, the government of the living by the dead. To a very considerable extent no doubt it is inevitable that the living should be so governed. The past gives us our vocabulary and fixes the limits of our imagination; we cannot get away from it. There is, too, a peculiar logical pleasure in making manifest the continuity between what we are doing and what has been done before. But the present has a right to govern itself so far as it can; and it ought always to be remembered that historic continuity with the past is not a duty, it is only a necessity.
Constitutions are intended to preserve practical and substantial rights, not to maintain theories.
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.
Keep government poor and remain free.
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.
A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanging, 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.