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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
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.
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.
It is revolting to have no better reason for a rule of law than that so it was laid down in the time of Henry IV.
A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The object of our study, then, is prediction, the prediction of the incidence of the public force through the instrumentality of the courts.
The Path of the Law (1897)
I think it not improbable that man, like the grub that prepares a chamber for the winged thing it never has seen but is to be — that man may have cosmic destinies that he does not understand.
Law and the Court (1913)
There are not infrequent times when a bottle of wine, a good dinner, a girl of some trivial sort can fill the hour for me.
How odious a virtue the much praised simplicity. 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.
The chief end of a man is to frame general ideas — and... no general idea is worth a damn.
I can't help preferring champagne to ditch water — I doubt if the universe does.
If I were dying, my last words would be, Have faith and pursue the unknown end.
Letter to John Ching Hsiung Wu (1924)
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.
Natural Law", 32 Harvard Law Review 40, 41 (1918)
Eloquence may set fire to reason.
Man is born a predestined idealist, for he is born to act. To act is to affirm the worth of an end, and to persist in affirming the worth of an end is to make an ideal.
When we study law we are not studying a mystery but a well-known profession.
The Path of the Law (1897)
As for us, our days of combat are over.
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