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Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
91 quotes
“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with the hovel, the dinner at Sherry's with the workingman's pail, and never ask how much or realize how little is withdrawn to make the prizes of success.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.)”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When twenty years ago a vague terror went over the earth and the word socialism began to be heard, I thought and still think that fear was translated into doctrines that had no proper place in the Constitution or the common law. Judges are apt to be naif, simple-minded men, and they need something of Mephistopheles. We too need education in the obvious—to learn to transcend our own convictions and to leave room for much that we hold dear to be done away with short of revolution by the orderly change of law.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our test of truth is a reference to either a present or an imagined future majority in favor of our view.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Deep-seated preferences cannot be argued about — you cannot argue a man into liking a glass of beer — and therefore, when differences are sufficiently far reaching, we try to kill the other man rather than let him have his way. But that is perfectly consistent with admitting that, so far as appears, his grounds are just as good as ours.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Only the emergency that makes it immediately dangerous to leave the correction of evil counsels to time warrants making any exception to the sweeping command, "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I always say, as you know, that if my fellow citizens want to go to Hell I will help them. It's my job.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) first seen 1920 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Harold Laski (4 March 1920); reported in Holmes-Laski Letters (1953) by Mark DeWolfe Howe, vol. 1, p. 249.
“Men must turn square corners when they deal with the Government.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) first seen 1920 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Rock Island C.R.R. v. United States, 254 U.S. 141, 143 (22 November 1920).
“Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) first seen 1921 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Brown v. United States, 256 U.S. 335, 343 (16 May 1921).
“A page of history is worth a volume of logic.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) first seen 1921 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: New York Trust Co. v. Eisner, 256 U.S. 345, 349 (1921).
“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.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) first seen 1922 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Jackman v. Rosenbaum Co., 260 U.S. 22, 31 (1922).
“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.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) first seen 1922 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Pennsylvania Coal Company v. H. J. Mahon, 260 U.S. 415, 415 (1922).
“If I were dying, my last words would be, Have faith and pursue the unknown end.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) first seen 1924 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to John Ching Hsiung Wu (1924), published in Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: His Book Notices and Uncollected Letters and Papers (1936) by Harry Clair Shriver, p. 175.
“Eloquence may set fire to reason.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) first seen 1925 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Gitlow v. People of New York, 268 U.S. 652 (1925) (dissenting).
“If in the long run the beliefs expressed in proletarian dictatorship are destined to be accepted by the dominant forces of the community, the only meaning of free speech is that they should be given their chance and have their way.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) first seen 1925 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Gitlow v. People of New York, 268 U.S. 652 (1925) (dissenting).
“We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. 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....Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) first seen 1927 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Writing for the Court, Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200, 207 (1927) (endorsing Virginia's eugenics program).
“The power to tax is not the power to destroy while this Court sits.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) first seen 1928 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Panhandle Oil Co. v. Mississippi ex rel. Knox, 277 U.S. 233 (1928).
“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.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) first seen 1928 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 469 (1928) (Holmes, J., dissenting).
“Some of her answers might excite popular prejudice, but if there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) first seen 1929 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: United States v. Schwimmer, 279 U.S. 644 (1929) (Holmes, J., dissenting).
“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.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) first seen 1930 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Writing for the Court, United States v. Wurzbach, 280 U.S. 396, 399 (1930).
“Young man, the secret of my success is that at an early age I discovered that I was not God.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) first seen 1931 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On his 90th birthday to a journalist (8 March 1931), as quoted in Information 2000: Library and Information Services for the 21st Century, Vol. 1991, Part 2 (1992) by the U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Inform…
“There are some men, who as they approach 70, read the Bible and prepare to die. Others prepare themselves to live to 90. It has been my observation that if a man prepares to live to 90, but dies at 70, no harm is done. If however, a man prepares to live to 70 but ends up dying at 90, then his last 20 years will be hell.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) first seen 1931 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Writing for the Court, New Jersey v. New York, et al., 283 U.S. 336, 342 (1931).
“The interpretation of constitutional principles must not be too literal. We must remember that the machinery of government would not work if it were not allowed a little play in its joints.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) first seen 1931 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Writing for the Court, Bain Peanut Co. v. Pinson, 282 U.S. 499, 501 (1931).
“I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy — I don't disparage envy but I don't accept it as legitimately my master.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) first seen 1916 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Holmes-Laski Letters : The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Harold J. Laski, 1916 - 1935 (1953), Vol. 2, p. 942.
“A good catchword can obscure analysis for fifty years.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted by Wendell Willkie during an America's Town Meeting of the Air broadcast, at The Town Hall in New York City, (6 January 1938).
Also quoted by: Wendell Willkie
“IF ALL the trees in all the woods were men; And each and every blade of grass a pen; If every leaf on every shrub and tree Turned to a sheet of foolscap; every sea Were changed to ink, and all earth’s living tribes Had nothing else to do but act as scribes, And for ten thousand ages, day and night, The human race should write, and write, and write, Till all the pens and paper were used up, And the huge inkstand was an empty cup, Still would the scribblers clustered round its brink Call for more pens, more paper, and more Ink ❦”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Published December 1953 in the Atlantic Monthly
“Lawyers spend their professional careers shoveling smoke.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Attributed in Watergate and the White House, Volumes 1-2 (1973) by Edward W. Knappman, p. 100; this has also become paraphrased as "Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke".
“Gentlemen, to the lady without whom I should never have survived for eighty, nor sixty, nor yet thirty years. Her smile has been my lyric, her understanding, the rhythm of the stanza. She has been the spring wherefrom I have drawn the power to write the words. She is the poem of my life.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) first seen 1929 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Attribution reported in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989), which states that this is not verified in works about him nor in Magnificent Yankee, the film about him. Holmes expressed a similar sentime…
“A second class mind, but a first class temperament.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A summation of his opinion of Theodore Roosevelt, indicated in various letters, but not recorded in so succinct a form; often incorrectly stated as his opinion of Franklin D. Roosevelt, as indicated in the p. xiv–xv Int…
“We know that, if the armies of our war did anything worth remembering, the credit belongs not mainly to the individuals who did it, but to average human nature. We also know very well that we cannot live in associations with the past alone, and we admit that, if we would be worthy of the past, we must find new fields for action or thought, and make for ourselves new careers. But, nevertheless, the generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its experience. Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing. While we are permitted to scorn nothing but indifference, and do not pretend to undervalue the worldly rewards of ambition, we have seen with our own eyes, beyond and above the gold fields, the snowy heights of honor, and it is for us to bear the report to those who come after us.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) first seen 1895 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Learning and Science", speech at a dinner of the Harvard Law School Association in honor of Professor C. C. Langdell (June 25, 1895); reported in Speeches by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1896). p. 67-68.
“I always say you can get your tragedy of any desired length in England, from thirty seconds to a lifetime. I had one adorable one of twenty-nine minutes by the watch. At the end of that time I started for my train. Woman I'd had a glimpse of in London — walk. She sat on a style, I below her, gazing into her eyes — then, "remember this lane," "while memory holds its seat, etc." "Adieu." And I still do and ever shall remember her, and I rather think she does me a little bit. What imbecilities for an old fellow to be talking. But if one knows his place and makes way for younger men when he isn't sure, it is better perhaps not quite to abandon interest in the sports of life.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) first seen 1895 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Sir Frederick Pollock (23 August 1895); reported in Holmes-Pollock Letters: The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Sir Frederick Pollock (1961) edited by Mark De Wolfe Howe, Vol. 1, p. 60; also reported …
“When we study law we are not studying a mystery but a well-known profession. We are studying what we shall want in order to appear before judges, or to advise people in such a way as to keep them out of court. The reason why it is a profession, why people will pay lawyers to argue for them or to advise them, is that in societies like ours the command of the public force is intrusted to the judges in certain cases, and the whole power of the state will be put forth, if necessary, to carry out their judgments and decrees. People want to know under what circumstances and how far they will run the risk of coming against what is so much stronger than themselves, and hence it becomes a business to find out when this danger is to be feared. The object of our study, then, is prediction, the prediction of the incidence of the public force through the instrumentality of the courts.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is urged in the first place that contempts cannot be crimes, because, although punishable by imprisonment, and therefore, if crimes, infamous, they are not within the protection of the Constitution and the Amendments giving a right to trial by jury, etc., to persons charged with such crimes. But the provisions of the Constitution are not mathematical formulas having their essence in their form; they are organic, living institutions transplanted from English soil. Their significance is vital, not formal; it is to be gathered not simply by taking the words and a dictionary, but by considering their origin and the line of their growth.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) first seen 1914 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Gompers v. United States, 233 U.S. 604, 610 (1914).
“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.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I confess that I do not understand the principle on which the power to fix a minimum for the wages of women can be denied by those who admit the power to fix a maximum for their hours of work. I fully assent to the proposition that here as elsewhere the distinctions of the law are distinctions of degree, but I perceive no difference in the kind or degree of interference with liberty, the only matter with which we have any concern, between the one case and the other. The bargain is equally affected whichever half you regulate…. It will need more than the Nineteenth Amendment to convince me that there are no differences between men and women, or that legislation cannot take those differences into account.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) first seen 1923 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., dissenting, Adkins, et al., Constituting the Minimum Wage Board of the District of Columbia, v. Children's Hospital of the District of Columbia; Same v. Lyons, 261 U.S. 569–70 (1923).