Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.: Trending quotes (page 3)

“Young man, the secret of my success is that at an early age I discovered that I was not God.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

On his 90th birthday to a journalist (8 March 1931), as quoted in Information 2000: Library and Information Services for the 21st Century, Vol. 1991, Part 2 (1992) by the U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science, p. 272.
1930s

For Men , God , Secret , Age

“A river is more than an amenity, it is a treasure. It offers a necessity of life that must be rationed among those who have power over it.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Writing for the Court, New Jersey v. New York, et al., 283 U.S. 336, 342 (1931).
1930s

Life

“It is now the moment when by common consent we pause to become conscious of our national life and to rejoice in it, to recall what our country has done for each of us, and to ask ourselves what we can do for the country in return.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

1880s, In Our Youth Our Hearts Were Touched With Fire (1884)

Life , Country

“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.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Northern Securities Co. v. United States, 193 U.S. 197, 400-401 (1904).
1900s

Law , Feeling , Future

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Ibid., p. 88-96.
1880s

Evil

“I confess that I do not understand the principle on which the power to fix a minimum for the wages of women can be denied by those who admit the power to fix a maximum for their hours of work. I fully assent to the proposition that here as elsewhere the distinctions of the law are distinctions of degree, but I perceive no difference in the kind or degree of interference with liberty, the only matter with which we have any concern, between the one case and the other. The bargain is equally affected whichever half you regulate…. It will need more than the Nineteenth Amendment to convince me that there are no differences between men and women, or that legislation cannot take those differences into account.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., dissenting, Adkins, et al., Constituting the Minimum Wage Board of the District of Columbia, v. Children's Hospital of the District of Columbia; Same v. Lyons, 261 U.S. 569–70 (1923).
1920s

Women , Men , Law , Understanding

“That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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

Life

“Most men think dramatically, not quantitatively, a fact that the rich would be wise to remember more than they do. We are apt to contrast the palace with the hovel, the dinner at Sherry's with the workingman's pail, and never ask how much or realize how little is withdrawn to make the prizes of success. (Subordinate prizes — since the only prize much cared for by the powerful is power. The prize of the general is not a bigger tent, but command.)”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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

Men , Thinking , Success

“Some of her answers might excite popular prejudice, but 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.

United States v. Schwimmer, 279 U.S. 644 (1929) (Holmes, J., dissenting).
1920s

Hate , Freedom

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

1890s, The Path of the Law (1897)

“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.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

"Common Carriers and the Common Law", 13 Am. Law Rev. 608, 630 (1879).
1870s

Cats , Failure

“Now and then, an extraordinary case may turn up, but constitutional law, like other mortal contrivances, has to take some chances, and in the great majority of instances, no doubt, justice will be done.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Blinn v. Nelson, 222 U.S. 1, 7 (1911).
1910s

Justice , Law , Chance

“The elaborate argument against the constitutionality of the Act if interpreted as we read it, in accordance with its obvious meaning does not need an elaborate answer.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Writing for the Court, United States v. Wurzbach, 280 U.S. 396, 399 (1930).
1930s

Reading

“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.

1880s, In Our Youth Our Hearts Were Touched With Fire (1884)

Life , Thinking , Passion , Time

“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.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

1890s, The Path of the Law (1897)

Law , Study , Future

“Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Often given as: A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.
Or: A mind that is stretched by a new idea can never go back to its old dimensions.
Actually by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Senior, from " Autocrat of the Breakfast Table https://books.google.com/books?id=BoQ3AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA502&dq=%22stretched+by+a+new+idea%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwidspn60tTJAhVJ1GMKHbt3Bn0Q6AEIHTAA#v=onepage&q=%22stretched%20by%20a%20new%20idea%22&f=false", originally published in The Atlantic, September 1858.
Misattributed

Idea

“To be 70 years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be 40 years old.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Almost certainly attributable to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., who is, in various sources, credited with having said this in letters to Harriet Beecher Stowe (who turned 70 in 1881) and Julia Ward Howe (who turned 70 in 1889), as well as having made the commented about himself. Holmes, Sr. reached the age of 70 in 1879, while Holmes, Jr. reached that age in 1911, some time after the earliest reports of this quote.
Misattributed

Hope

“Get down, you fool!”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Assertion famously directed at then-President Abraham Lincoln when he came under enemy fire at Fort Stevens during the American Civil War, as quoted in Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (2005) by Doris Kearns Goodwin, p. 643.
1860s

Fools

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Panhandle Oil Co. v. Mississippi ex rel. Knox http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?friend=oyez&court=us&vol=277&invol=218, 277 U.S. 233 (1928).
1920s

“Lawyers spend their professional careers shoveling smoke.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Attributed in Watergate and the White House, Volumes 1-2 (1973) by Edward W. Knappman, p. 100; this has also become paraphrased as "Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke".
Attributions