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The worst of a modern stylish mansion is that it has no place for ghosts. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
You hear that boy laughing?you think he's all fun; But the angels laugh, too, at the good he has done; The children laugh loud as they troop to his call, And the poor man that knows him laughs loudest of all. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
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. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Life, not the parson, teaches conduct. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The mark of a civilized man is his willingness to re-examine his most cherished beliefs. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The history of what the law has been is necessary to the knowledge of what the law is. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
A goose flies by a chart the Royal Geographic Society could not improve. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Men, like peaches and pears, grow sweet a little while before they begin to decay. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
In my opinion, economists and sociologists are the people to whom we ought to turn more than we do for instruction in the grounds and foundations of all rational decisions. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
To be forgotten is to sleep in peace with the undisturbed myriads, no longer subject to the chills and heats, the blasts, the sleet, the dust, which assail in endless succession that shadow of a man which we call his reputation. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Deep-seated preferences cannot be argued about-you cannot argue a man into liking a glass of beer. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
There is a little plant called reverence in the corner of my soul's garden, which I love to have watered once a week. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
We are all sentenced to capital punishment for the crime of living, and though the condemned cell of our earthly existence is but a narrow and bare dwelling-place, we have adjusted ourselves to it, and made it tolerably comfortable for the little while we are to be confined in it. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
I should like to see any kind of man, distinguishable from a gorilla, that some good and even pretty woman could not shape a husband out of. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
There was never an idea started that woke up men out of their stupid indifference but its originator was spoken of as a crank. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Old age is like an opium dream. Nothing seems real except the unreal. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Knowledge and timber shouldn't be much used till they are seasoned. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The riders in a race do not stop when they reach the goal. There is a little finishing canter before coming to a standstill. There is time to hear the kind voices of friends and say to oneself, The work is done. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Free competition is worth more to society than it costs. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
There is in all men a demand for the superlative, so much so that the poor devil that has no other way of reaching it attains it by getting drunk. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought, not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The petitioner may have a constitutional right to talk politics, but he has no constitutional right to be a policeman. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in colour and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Reason may be the lever, but sentiment gives you the fulcrum and the place to stand on if you want to move the world. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The rules of evidence in the main are based on experience, logic, and common sense, less hampered by history than some parts of the substantive law. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Any new formula which suddenly emerges in our consciousness has its roots in long trains of thought; it is virtually old when it first makes its appearance among the recognized growths of our intellect. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
But the moment you turn a corner you see another straight stretch ahead and there comes some further challenge to your ambition. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The greatest act of faith is when a man understands he is not God. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Go on, fair Science; soon to thee
Shall Nature yield her idle boast;
Her vulgar lingers formed a tree,
But thou hast trained it to a post. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
There is nothing earthly that lasts so well, as money. A man's learning dies with him, as does his virtues fade out of remembrance, but the dividends on the stocks he bequeaths to his children live and keep his memory green. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most important thing in the end. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
It seems to me that at this time we need education in the obvious more than investigation of the obscure. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The preacher's garment is cut according to the pattern of that of the hearers, for the most part. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
On every stem, on every leaf, ... and at the root of everything that grew, was a professional specialist in the shape of grub, caterpillar, aphis, or other expert, whose business it was to devour that particular part. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Where we stand is not as important as the direction in which we are moving. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Most people are willing to take the Sermon on the Mount as a flag to sail under, but few will use it as a rudder by which to steer. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Men are idolaters, and want something to look at and kiss and hug, or throw themselves down before; they always did, they always will; and if you don't make it of wood, you must make it of words. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
A man who called everyone a damn fool is like a man who damns the weather. He only shows that he is not adapted to his environment, not that the environment is wrong. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
A great man represents a great ganglion in the nerves of society, or to vary the figure, a strategic point in the campaign of history, and part of his greatness consists in his being there. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
If you don't know what you want, you will probably never get it. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts, but learning how to make facts live. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
For him in vain the envious seasons roll
Who bears eternal summer in his soul. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
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. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Poverty comes pleading not for charity, for the most part, but imploring us to find a purchaser for its unmarketable wares. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
It is perfectly easy to be original by violating the laws of decency and the canons of good taste. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Reason means truth and those who are not governed by it
take the chance that someday the sunken fact will rip
the bottom out of their boat. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
We are very quiet there, but it is the quiet of a storm centre. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Society is always trying in some way to grind us down to a single flat surface. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
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. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The foliage has been losing its freshness through the month of August, and here and there a yellow leaf shows itself like the first gray hair amidst the locks of a beauty who has seen one season too many. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Pretty much all law consists in forbidding men to do something that they want to do. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
I believe that there are no innate, intrinsic differences among a human being , a baboon or a grain of sand. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
But, nevertheless, the generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its experience. Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
We have shared the incommunicable experience of war, we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top. In our youth our hearts were touched with fire. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
War? War is an organized bore. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
General propositions do not decide concrete cases. The decision will depend on a judgment or intuition more subtle than any articulate major premise. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Old age is fifteen years older than I am. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Even the wisest woman you talk to is ignorant of something you may know, but an elegant woman never forgets her elegance. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
But I have long thought that if you knew a column of advertisements by heart, you could achieve unexpected felicities with them. You can get a happy quotation anywhere if you have the eye. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The joy of life is to put out one's power in some natural and useful or harmless way. There is no other. And the real misery is not to do this. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
A good soldier, like a good horse, cannot be of a bad color. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Don't flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Every man is an omnibus in which his ancestors ride. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Science ... in other words, knowledge-is not the enemy of religion; for, if so, then religion would mean ignorance. But it is often the antagonist of school-divinity. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
It is mere childishness to expect men to believe as their fathers did; that is, if they have any minds of their own. The world is a whole generation older and wiser than when the father was of his son's age. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Men are tattooed with their special beliefs like so many South Sea Islanders; but a real human heart with divine love in it beats with the same glow under all the patterns of all earth's thousand tribes. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep to the real and the true. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Success. Is not the position where you are standing, but which direction you are going. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
I know of no teachers so powerful and persuasive as the little army of specialists. They carry no banners, they beat no drums; but where they are men learn that bustle and push are not the equals of quiet genius and serene mastery. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Academic life is but half life it is a withdrawal from the fight to utter smart things that cost you nothing except the thinking them from a cloister. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Modesty and reverence are no less virtues of freemen than the democratic feeling which will submit neither to arrogance nor to servility. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Beware of making your moral staple consist of the negative virtues. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of superstitious fears which were implanted in his imagination, no matter how utterly his reason may reject them. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The first requirement of a sound body of law is, that it should correspond with the actual feelings and demands of the community, whether right or wrong. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Man has will, but woman has her way. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
In order to know whether a human being is young or old, offer it food of different kinds at short intervals. If young, it will eat anything at any hour of the day or night. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
It's a good thing to be rich and a good thing to be strong, but it is a better thing to be beloved of many friends. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Men must turn square corners when they deal with the Government. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Any tax is a discouragement and therefore a regulation so far as it goes. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
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. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief and if believed it is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at birth. Eloquence may set fire to reason. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Lord, bid war's trumpet cease; Fold the whole earth in peace. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
There is one gratification an old author can afford a certain class of critics; that namely, of comparing him as he is with what he was. It is a pleasure to mediocrity to have its superiors brought within range. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe ... that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market ... That at any rate is the theory of our constitution. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
A new and valid idea is worth more than a regiment and fewer men can furnish the former than command the latter. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
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. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
There is no time like the old time, when you and I were young! -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the center of each and every town or city. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
[The Constitution] is an experiment as all life is an experiment. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Young feller, you will never appreciate the potentialities of the English language until you have heard a Southern mule driver search the soul of a mule. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The only prize much cared for by the powerful is power. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
There is nothing like the dead cold hand of the past to take down our tumid egotism and lead us into the solemn flow of the life of our race. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
As for the excellent little wretches who grow up in what they are taught, with never a scruple or a query, ... they signify nothing in the intellectual life of the race. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
To know is not less than to feel. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
To us who remain behind is left this day of memories. Every year
in the full tide of spring, at the height of the symphony of flowers and love and life
there comes a pause, and through the silence we hear the lonely pipe of death. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Most of us retain enough of the theological attitude to think that we are little gods. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Young man, the secret of my success is that an early age I discovered that I was not God. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The young man knows the rules but the old man knows the exceptions. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Be willing to commit yourself to a course, perhaps a long and hard one, without being able to foresee exactly where you will come out. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The great end of being is to harmonize man with the order of things, and the church has been a good pitch-pipe, and may be so still. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The world has its fling at lawyers sometimes, but its very denial is an admission. It feels, what I believe to be the truth, that of all secular professions this has the highest standards. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
We have to choose, and for my part I think it a less evil that some criminals should escape than that the government should play an ignoble part. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
I despise making the most of one's time. Half of the pleasures of life consist of the opportunities one has neglected. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas [and] the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
It is very grand to die in harness, but it is very pleasant to have the tight straps unbuckled and the heavy collar lifted from the neck and shoulders. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
To think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Research and writing are lonely occupations. It is easy to become discouraged in solitary confinement. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The rule of joy and the law of duty seem to me all one. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Our test of truth is a reference to either a present or imagined future majority in favour of our view. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The great act of faith is when a man decides he is not God. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
A person of genius should marry a person of character. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The wind blows out, the bubble dies; The spring entomb'd in autumn lies; The dew dries up; the star is shot; The flight is past, and man forgot. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
There are three natural anaesthetics: Sleep, fainting, and death. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Nothing is so commonplace has the wish to be remarkable. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Every year, if not every day, we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The very minute a thought is threatened with publicity it seems to shrink towards mediocrity. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
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.
It takes me several days, after I get back to Boston, to realize that the reference "the president" refers to the president of Harvard and not to a minor official in Washington. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
A man's opinions are generally of much more value than his arguments. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The man of action has the present, but the thinker controls the future. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
A river is more than an amenity, it is a treasure. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Young men know the rules, but old men know the exceptions. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
To brag little, to lose well, / To crow gently if in luck, / To pay up, to own up, / To shut up if beaten, / Are the virtues of a sportingman. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The difference between gossip and philosophy lies only in one's way of taking a fact. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Under bad manners, as under graver faults, lies very commonly an overestimate of our special individuality, as distinguished from our generic humanity. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
I detest a man who knows that he knows. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
If you can eat sawdust without butter, you can be a success in the law. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Our morality seems to be only a check on the ultimate domination of force, just as our politeness is a check on the impulse of every pig to put his feet in the trough. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Imitation is a necessity of human nature. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
And silence, like a poultice, comes To heal the blows of sound. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The individual will always be a minority. If a man is in a minority of one, we lock him up. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirms the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
No generalization is wholly true - not even this one. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
From forty to fifty a man must move upward, or the natural falling off in the vigor of life will carry him rapidly downward. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
People talk fundamentals and superlatives and then make some changes of detail. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Leisure only means a chance to do other jobs that demand attention. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
While we've youth in our hearts, we can never grow old. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Knowledge-it excites prejudices to call it science-is advancing as irresistibly, as majestically, as remorselessly as the ocean moves in upon the shore. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The language of judicial decision is mainly the language of logic. And the logical method and form flatter that longing for certainty and for repose which is in every human mind. But certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The root of joy, as of duty, is to put all one's powers towards some great end. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
It is very lonely sometimes, trying to play God. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
A child's education should begin at least 100 years before he was born. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
This is a court of law, not a court of justice. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
A new untruth is better than an old truth. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The thing I want to do is put as many new ideas into the law as I can, to show how particular solutions involve general theory, and to do it with style. I should like to be admitted to be the greatest jurist in the world. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
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. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Fame is the scentless sunflower, with gaudy crown of gold; But friendship is the rose, with sweets in every fold. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Most people have died before they expire; died to all earthly longings, so that the last breath is only, as it were, the locking of the door of the already deserted mansion. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The great thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are going. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Who does not feel that Nansen's account of his search for the Pole rather loses than gains in ideal satisfaction by the pretense of a few trifling acquisitions for science? -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
You make me chuckle when you say that you are no longer young, that you have turned twenty-four. A man is or may be young to after sixty, and not old before eighty. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
To an imagination of any scope the most far reaching form of power is not money, it is the command of ideas -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Every man has a right to do what he wills, provided he interferes not with a like right on the part of his neighbors. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
What I wouldn't give to be seventy again! -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The ideas of the classics, so far as living, are our commonplaces. It is the modern books that give us the latest and most profound conceptions. It seems to me rather a lazy makeshift to mumble over the familiar. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
If one of two or more joint wrongdoers has to pay all the damages, he cannot recover contribution from his fellows. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
To be civilized is to be potentially master of all possible ideas, and that means that one has got beyond being shocked, although one preserves one's own moral aesthetic preferences. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The minute a phrase, becomes current, it becomes an apology for not thinking accurately to the end of the sentence. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
A man is usually more careful of his money than of his principles. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The only condition of peace in this world is to have no ideas, or, at least not to express them. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Every idea is an incitement ... eloquence may set fire to reason. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Nothing can be so perfect while we possess it as it will seem when remembered. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
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. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
We expect more of ourselves than we have any right to. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Longevity is having a chronic disease - and taking care of it. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
There are many things which we can afford to forget which it is yet well to learn. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
But the word "right" is one of the most deceptive of pitfalls; it is so easy to slip from a qualified meaning in the premise to an unqualified one in the conclusion. Most rights are qualified. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Eloquence may set fire to reason. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Blood is a destiny. One's genius descends in the stream from long lines of ancestry. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
History has to be rewritten because history is the selection of those threads of causes or antecedents that we are interested in. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Liberty is often a heavy burden on a man. It involves the necessity for perpetual choice which is the kind of labor men have always dreaded. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
If wine tells truth - and so have said the wise, It makes me laugh to think how brandy lies! -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
To be master of any branch of knowledge, you must master those which lie next to it, and thus to know anything you must know all. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.