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Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Quotes
1841–1935 United States
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (8 March 1841 – 6 March 1935) was an American jurist and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1902 to 1932; he was often called "The Great Dissenter", and was the son of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
United States Judges Lawyers Non-fiction authors Philosophers Also known as: Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr., Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Random Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. quote
97 quotes
It is the merit of the common law that it decides the case first and determines the principle afterwards.
It cannot be helped, it is as it should be, that the law is behind the times.
Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife.
The mode in which the inevitable comes to pass is through effort.
One has to try to strike the jugular and let the rest go.
Lawyers spend their professional careers shoveling smoke.
Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.
A page of history is worth a volume of logic.
That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.
Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616 (1919)
Young man, the secret of my success is that at an early age I discovered that I was not God.
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.
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.
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.
Men must turn square corners when they deal with the Government.
The idealists give away their case when they write books. For it shows that they have done the great act of faith and decided that they are not God.
The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.
The Path of the Law (1897)
The man of action has the present, but the thinker controls the future.
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.
General propositions do not decide concrete cases.
Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905)
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.
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