Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.: Trending quotes

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Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.: 214 quotes7 likes

“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.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 469 (1928) (Holmes, J., dissenting).
1920s

“Beware how you take away hope from any human being.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., in his valedictory address to medical graduates at Harvard University (10 March 1858), published in The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal Vol. LVIII, No. 8 (25 March 1858), p. 158; this has also been paraphrased "Beware how you take away hope from another human being".
Misattributed

“The degree of civilization which a people has reached, no doubt, is marked by their anxiety to do as they would be done by.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Ibid., p. 44.
1880s

“I always say, as you know, that if my fellow citizens want to go to Hell I will help them. It's my job.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Letter to Harold J. Laski (4 March 1920); reported in Holmes-Laski Letters (1953) by Mark DeWolfe Howe, vol. 1, p. 249.
1920s

“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.

Frank v. Magnum, 237 U.S. 309, 347 (1915).
1910s

“It is urged in the first place that contempts cannot be crimes, because, although punishable by imprisonment, and therefore, if crimes, infamous, they are not within the protection of the Constitution and the Amendments giving a right to trial by jury, etc., to persons charged with such crimes. But the provisions of the Constitution are not mathematical formulas having their essence in their form; they are organic, living institutions transplanted from English soil. Their significance is vital, not formal; it is to be gathered not simply by taking the words and a dictionary, but by considering their origin and the line of their growth.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Gompers v. United States, 233 U.S. 604, 610 (1914).
1910s

“Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Brown v. United States, 256 U.S. 335, 343 (16 May 1921).
1920s

“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.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

1910s, "Natural Law", 32 Harvard Law Review 40, 41 (1918)

“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.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Jackman v. Rosenbaum Co., 260 U.S. 22, 31 (1922).
1920s

“Free competition is worth more to society than it costs.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Vegelahn v. Guntner, 167 Mass. 92, 44 N.E. 1077, 1080 (1896) (Supreme Court of Massachusetts, Holmes dissenting).
1890s

“The character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47, 52 (3 March 1919).
1910s

“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.

1890s, The Path of the Law (1897)

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47, 52 (3 March 1919).
1910s

“Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

1910s, "Natural Law", 32 Harvard Law Review 40, 41 (1918)

“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.

"The Path of the Law," Address to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts at the dedication of the new hall of the Boston University School of Law (8 January 1897), published in Harvard Law Review, Vol. 10 (25 March 1897).
1890s

“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.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

250 U.S. at 630.
1910s, Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616 (1919)

“Eloquence may set fire to reason.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Gitlow v. People of New York, 268 U.S. 652 (1925) (dissenting).
1920s

“Our test of truth is a reference to either a present or an imagined future majority in favor of our view.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

1910s, "Natural Law", 32 Harvard Law Review 40, 41 (1918)

“Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

A paraphrase of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., in "The Poet at the Breakfast-Table" in The Atlantic Monthly Vol. 29 (1872), p. 231: "I like children, — he said to me one day at table. — I like 'em, and I respect 'em. Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by them".
Misattributed

“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.

1910s, "Law and the Court" (1913)