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The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. The Path of the Law (1897)

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History

More quotes by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.

The Path of the Law (1897)

State interference is an evil, where it cannot be shown to be a good.

Nature has but one judgment on wrong conduct — if you can call that a judgment which seemingly has no reference to conduct as such — the judgment of death.

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.

The power to tax is not the power to destroy while this Court sits.

All Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. quotes →

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A generation which ignores history has no past —and no future.

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History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

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If we don’t care about our past we can’t have very much hope for our future.

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I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past, — so good night!

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.