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.
General propositions do not decide concrete cases.
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.
An aristocrat in morals as in mind.
To allow opposition by speech seems to indicate that you think the speech impotent, as when a man says that he has squared the circle, or that you do not care whole-heartedly for the result, or that you doubt either your power or your premises. But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas —that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution.
For the rational study of the law the blackletter man may be the man of the present, but the man of the future is the man of statistics and the master of economics.
Whatever disagreement there may be as to the scope of the phrase "due process of law" there can be no doubt that it embraces the fundamental conception of a fair trial, with opportunity to be heard.
As for us, our days of combat are over. Our swords are rust. Our guns will thunder no more. The vultures that once wheeled over our heads must be buried with their prey. Whatever of glory must be won in the council or the closet, never again in the field. I do not repine. We have shared the incommunicable experience of war; we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top.
A page of history is worth a volume of logic.
Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our fathers have done them or our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a larger part than what we suspect of what we think.