97 quotes
Our test of truth is a reference to either a present or an imagined future majority in favor of our view.
Natural Law", 32 Harvard Law Review 40, 41 (1918)
Every opinion tends to become a law.
Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905)
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.
In Our Youth Our Hearts Were Touched With Fire (1884)
The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race.
The Path of the Law (1897)
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.
Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616 (1919)
The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience... The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics.
The Common Law (1881)
Great cases like hard cases make bad law. For great cases are called great, not by reason of their importance in shaping the law of the future, but because of some accident of immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings and distorts the judgement.
Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.
Natural Law", 32 Harvard Law Review 40, 41 (1918)
I always say, as you know, that if my fellow citizens want to go to Hell I will help them. It's my job.
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.
The Path of the Law (1897)
The common law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky, but the articulate voice of some sovereign or quasi sovereign that can be identified; although some decisions with which I have disagreed seem to me to have forgotten the fact.
A question like the present should be disposed of without undue delay. But a State cannot be expected to move with the celerity of a private business man; it is enough if it proceeds, in the language of the English Chancery, with all deliberate speed.
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.
One of the eternal conflicts out of which life is made up is that between the effort of every man to get the most he can for his services, and that of society, disguised under the name of capital, to get his services for the least possible return.
But as precedents survive like the clavicle in the cat, long after the use they once served is at an end, and the reason for them has been forgotten, the result of following them must often be failure and confusion from the merely logical point of view.
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."
Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616 (1919)
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.
Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616 (1919)
"Early Forms of Liability," Lecture I from The Common Law. (1909).
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.
Attribution reported in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989)
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.
Natural Law", 32 Harvard Law Review 40, 41 (1918)