QUOTES by Oliver Wendell Holmes
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“The only simplicity for which I would give a straw is that which is on the other side of the complex — not that which never has divined it.”
Quote by -Oliver Wendell Holmes
“The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law.”
Quote by -Oliver Wendell Holmes
“if one of two or more joint wrongdoers has to pay all the damages, he cannot recover contribution from his fellows.”
Quote by -Oliver Wendell Holmes
“Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it.”
Quote by -Oliver Wendell Holmes
“If my fellow citizens want to go to Hell I will help them. Its my job.”
Quote by -Oliver Wendell Holmes
“The very minute a thought is threatened with publicity it seems to shrink towards mediocrity.”
Quote by -Oliver Wendell Holmes
“The rational study of law is still to a large extent the study of history. History must be a part of the study, because without it we cannot know the precise scope of rules which it is our business to know.”
Quote by -Oliver Wendell Holmes
“We are very quiet there, but it is the quiet of a storm centre. .”
Quote by -Oliver Wendell Holmes
“The petitioner may have a constitutional right to talk politics, but he has no constitutional right to be a policeman.”
Quote by -Oliver Wendell Holmes
“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.”
Quote by -Oliver Wendell Holmes
“Academic life is but half life it is a withdrawal from the fight to utter smart things that cost you nothing except the thinking them from a cloister.”
Quote by -Oliver Wendell Holmes
“The great thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are moving.”
Quote by -Oliver Wendell Holmes
“We have to choose, and for my part I think it a less evil that some criminals should escape than that the government should play an ignoble part.”
Quote by -Oliver Wendell Holmes
“Between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force.”
Quote by -Oliver Wendell Holmes
“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.”
Quote by -Oliver Wendell Holmes
“A man who called everyone a damn fool is like a man who damns the weather. He only shows that he is not adapted to his environment, not that the environment is wrong.”
Quote by -Oliver Wendell Holmes
“Every man has a right to do what he wills, provided he interferes not with a like right on the part of his neighbors.”
Quote by -Oliver Wendell Holmes
“Greatness is not in where we stand but in what direction we are moving. We must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it—but sail we must and not drift, nor lie at anchor.”
Quote by -Oliver Wendell Holmes
“A goose flies by a chart the Royal Geographic Society could not improve.”
Quote by -Oliver Wendell Holmes
“Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.”
Quote by -Oliver Wendell Holmes
“Every year, if not every day, we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge.”
Quote by -Oliver Wendell Holmes
“Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief and if believed it is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at birth. Eloquence may set fire to reason.”
Quote by -Oliver Wendell Holmes
“Young man, the secret of my success is that at an early age I discovered that I was not God.”
Quote by -Oliver Wendell Holmes
“I believe that there are no innate, intrinsic differences among a human being , a baboon or a grain of sand.”
Quote by -Oliver Wendell Holmes
“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. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
Quote by -Oliver Wendell Holmes
“A mind that is stretched by new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”
Quote by -Oliver Wendell Holmes
“The first requirement of a sound body of law is, that it should correspond with the actual feelings and demands of the community, whether right or wrong.”
Quote by -Oliver Wendell Holmes
“We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of superstitious fears which were implanted in his imagination, no matter how utterly his reason may reject them.”
Quote by -Oliver Wendell Holmes
“I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.”
Quote by -Oliver Wendell Holmes
“To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.”
Quote by -Oliver Wendell Holmes
“Most people are willing to take the Sermon on the Mount as a flag to sail under, but few will use it as a rudder by which to steer.”
Quote by -Oliver Wendell Holmes
“We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep to the real and the true.”
Quote by -Oliver Wendell Holmes
“We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.”
Quote by -Oliver Wendell Holmes
“If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I wouldn't pass it around. Wouldn't be doing anybody a favor. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't say embrace trouble. That's as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say, meet it as a friend, for you'll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it.”
Quote by -Oliver Wendell Holmes
“Don’t flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.”
Quote by -Oliver Wendell Holmes
“We have shared the incommunicable experience of war, we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top. In our youth our hearts were touched with fire.”
Quote by -Oliver Wendell Holmes
“A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; 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.”
Quote by -Oliver Wendell Holmes
“The man of action has the present, but the thinker controls the future.”
Quote by -Oliver Wendell Holmes
“The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract.”
Quote by -Oliver Wendell Holmes
“A child's education should begin at least 100 years before he was born.”
Quote by -Oliver Wendell Holmes