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.
Old age is always fifteen years older than I am.
The chief end of a man is to frame general ideas — and... no general idea is worth a damn.
That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.
Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.
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.
I always say, as you know, that if my fellow citizens want to go to Hell I will help them. It's my job.
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.
There is no friend like an old friend who has shared our morning days, no greeting like his welcome, no homage like his praise.
Men must turn square corners when they deal with the Government.
Great cases like hard cases make bad law. For great cases are called great, not by reason of their importance in shaping the law of the future, but because of some accident of immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings and distorts the judgement.
But as precedents survive like the clavicle in the cat, long after the use they once served is at an end, and the reason for them has been forgotten, the result of following them must often be failure and confusion from the merely logical point of view.
The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.
Beware how you take away hope from any human being.
It is only the present danger of immediate evil or an intent to bring it about that warrants Congress in setting a limit to the expression of opinion where private rights are not concerned.
Certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.
Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man's nose begins.
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
Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.
To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.
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.