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.
Eloquence may set fire to reason.
Lawyers spend their professional careers shoveling smoke.
The liberty of the citizen to do as he likes so long as he does not interfere with the liberty of others to do the same, which has been a shibboleth for some well known writers, is interfered with by school laws, by the Post Office, by every state or municipal institution which takes his money for purposes thought desirable, whether he likes it or not.
The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract.
While a judge of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, when he found the long-winded speeches of the lawyers especially trying, he advised them gravely to take a course of reading risque books, that they might learn to say things by innuendo.
The aim of the law is not to punish sins, but is to prevent certain external results.
Free competition is worth more to society than it costs.
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.
Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.
That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.
The chief end of a man is to frame general ideas — and... no general idea is worth a damn.
Old age is always fifteen years older than I am.
With all humility, I think, "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might." Infinitely more important than the vain attempt to love one's neighbor as one's self. If you want to hit a bird on the wing, you must have all your will in focus, you must not be thinking about yourself, and equally, you must not be thinking about your neighbor: you must be living in your eye on that bird. Every achievement is a bird on the wing.
Most men think dramatically, not quantitatively, a fact that the rich would be wise to remember more than they do. We are apt to contrast the palace with the hovel, the dinner at Sherry's with the workingman's pail, and never ask how much or realize how little is withdrawn to make the prizes of success. (Subordinate prizes — since the only prize much cared for by the powerful is power. The prize of the general is not a bigger tent, but command.)
Now and then, an extraordinary case may turn up, but constitutional law, like other mortal contrivances, has to take some chances, and in the great majority of instances, no doubt, justice will be done.
One of the eternal conflicts out of which life is made up is that between the effort of every man to get the most he can for his services, and that of society, disguised under the name of capital, to get his services for the least possible return.
Life is action, the use of one's powers. As to use them to their height is our joy and duty, so it is the one end that justifies itself.
Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife.
Courts are apt to err by sticking too closely to the words of a law where those words import a policy that goes beyond them.