Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.: Trending quotes

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Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.: 214 quotes7 likes

“Vanity is the most philosophical of those feelings that we are taught to despise. For vanity recognizes that if a man is in a minority of one we lock him up, and therefore longs for an assurance from others that one's work has not been in vain.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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

“I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy — I don't disparage envy but I don't accept it as legitimately my master.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Holmes-Laski Letters : The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Harold J. Laski, 1916 - 1935 (1953), Vol. 2, p. 942.
1930s

“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.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Address at the dedication of the Northwestern University Law School Building, Chicago, Illinois (20 October 1902); republished in Holmes' Collected Legal Papers (1937), p. 272.
1900s

“To allow opposition by speech seems to indicate that you think the speech impotent, as when a man says that he has squared the circle, or that you do not care whole-heartedly for the result, or that you doubt either your power or your premises. But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas —that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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

“Life is a roar of bargain and battle, but in the very heart of it there rises a mystic spiritual tone that gives meaning to the whole. It transmutes the dull details into romance. It reminds us that our only but wholly adequate significance is as parts of the unimaginable whole. It suggests that even while living we are living to ends outside ourselves”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Address to the Harvard Alumni Association to the Class of '61, in Speeches (1913), p. 96.
1910s

“A page of history is worth a volume of logic.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

New York Trust Co. v. Eisner, 256 U.S. 345, 349 (1921).
1920s

“Constitutions are intended to preserve practical and substantial rights, not to maintain theories.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Davis v. Mills, 194 U.S. 451, 457 (1904).
1900s

“The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience… The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. book The Common Law

The Common Law (1881), p. 1.
1880s

“A second class mind, but a first class temperament.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

A summation of his opinion of Theodore Roosevelt, indicated in various letters, but not recorded in so succinct a form; often incorrectly stated as his opinion of Franklin D. Roosevelt, as indicated in the p. xiv–xv Introduction to The Essential Holmes (1992) http://books.google.com/books?id=HamEkfqdMcEC&pg=PR14&lpg=PR14, edited by Richard A. Posner. <br class="br">Attributions

“There are some men, who as they approach 70, read the Bible and prepare to die. Others prepare themselves to live to 90. It has been my observation that if a man prepares to live to 90, but dies at 70, no harm is done. If however, a man prepares to live to 70 but ends up dying at 90, then his last 20 years will be hell.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

citation needed
1930s

“A good catchword can obscure analysis for fifty years.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Quoted by Wendell Willkie during an America's Town Meeting of the Air broadcast, at The Town Hall in New York City, (6 January 1938) http://books.google.com/books?id=GekBAAAAMAAJ&q=%22A+good+catchword%22+%22can+obscure+analysis+for+fifty+years%22&pg=A21#v=onepage.

“One has to try to strike the jugular and let the rest go.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Speech on the death of Walbridge Abner Field, Chief Justice of Massachusetts (25 November 1899), reported in Speeches by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1900), p. 77.
1900s

“The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour upon it, the closer it contracts.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., in "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table" in The New England Magazine, Vol. 1 (1831), p. 431.
Misattributed

“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.

"Holmes-Pollock Letters : The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Sir Frederick Pollock, 1874-1932" (2nd ed., 1961), p. 109.
Often quoted as "I wouldn't give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity; I would give my right arm for the simplicity on the far side of complexity" and attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr..
1930s

“A Constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory... It is made for people of fundamentally differing views, and the accident of our finding certain opinions natural and familiar, or novel, and even shocking, ought not to conclude our judgment upon the question whether statutes embodying them conflict with the Constitution of the United States.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

198 U.S. at 76.
1900s, Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905)

“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.

Speech to the Bar Association of Boston, in Speeches (1913), p. 86.
1910s

“Keep government poor and remain free.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Attributed to Holmes in a speech by Ronald Reagan (June 15,1982); reported as a misattribution by Paul F. Boller, Jr., and John George, They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, & Misleading Attributions (1989), p. 46-47.
Misattributed

“General propositions do not decide concrete cases.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

198 U.S. at 76.
1900s, Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905)

“The general rule, at least, is that while property may be regulated to a certain extent, if regulation goes too far it will be recognized as a taking.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Pennsylvania Coal Company v. H. J. Mahon, 260 U.S. 415, 415 (1922).
1920s

“The aim of the law is not to punish sins, but is to prevent certain external results.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Commonwealth v. Kennedy, 170 Mass. 18, 20 (1897) (opinion of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts).
1890s