Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr Quotes

I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.

Certitude leads to violence. This is a proposition that has an easy application and a difficult one. The easy application is to ideoologues, dogmatists, and bullies—people who think that their rigtness justifies them in imposing on anyone who does not happen to suscribe to their particular ideology, dogma or notion of turf. If the conviction of rightness is powerful enough, resistance to it will be met, sooner or later by force. There are people like this in every sphere of life, and it is natural to feel that the world would be a better place without them!

This is a court of law, not a court of justice.

The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.

Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.

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 time in which it is used.

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.

We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.

Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.

Life is action and passion; therefore it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of the time, at peril of being judged not to have lived.