Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.: Trending quotes (page 5)

“I do not think the United States would come to an end if we lost our power to declare an Act of Congress void. I do think the Union would be imperiled if we could not make that declaration as to the laws of the several States.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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

Law , Thinking

“Deep-seated preferences cannot be argued about — you cannot argue a man into liking a glass of beer — and therefore, when differences are sufficiently far reaching, we try to kill the other man rather than let him have his way. But that is perfectly consistent with admitting that, so far as appears, his grounds are just as good as ours.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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

Way , Beer , Appearance

“A man's mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Also reported as "One's mind" instead of "A man's mind", and "can never go back" or "never regains" instead of "never goes back"; most likely properly attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Misattributed

Powerful , Idea

“The interpretation of constitutional principles must not be too literal. We must remember that the machinery of government would not work if it were not allowed a little play in its joints.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Writing for the Court, Bain Peanut Co. v. Pinson, 282 U.S. 499, 501 (1931).
1930s

“A moment's insight is sometimes worth a lifetime's experience.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., in "The Professor at the Breakfast-Table" in The Atlantic Monthly Vol. 4 (1859), p. 505.
Misattributed

“With all humility, I think, "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might." Infinitely more important than the vain attempt to love one's neighbor as one's self. If you want to hit a bird on the wing, you must have all your will in focus, you must not be thinking about yourself, and equally, you must not be thinking about your neighbor: you must be living in your eye on that bird. Every achievement is a bird on the wing.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Speech to the Bar Association of Boston, in Speeches (1913), p. 85.
1910s

Love , Bird , Thinking

“Life is action, the use of one's powers. As to use them to their height is our joy and duty, so it is the one end that justifies itself.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Speech to the Bar Association of Boston, in Speeches (1913), p. 85.
1910s

Life , Joy

“The great act of faith is when a man decides that he is not God.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Letter http://archive.org/stream/thoughtandcharac032117mbp#page/n495/mode/2up/search/great+faith+man+God to William James (24 March 1907).
1900s

God , Faith

“Philosophy may have gained by the attempts in recent years to look through the fiction to the fact and to generalize corporations, partnerships, and other groups into a single conception. But to generalize is to omit, and, in this instance, to omit one characteristic of the complete corporation, as called into being under modern statutes, that is most important in business and law.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Donnell v. Herring-Hall-Marvin Safe Co., 208 U.S. 267, 273 (1908).
1900s

Law , Business , Partnership

“The law, so far as it depends on learning, is indeed, as it has been called, the government of the living by the dead. To a very considerable extent no doubt it is inevitable that the living should be so governed. The past gives us our vocabulary and fixes the limits of our imagination; we cannot get away from it. There is, too, a peculiar logical pleasure in making manifest the continuity between what we are doing and what has been done before. But the present has a right to govern itself so far as it can; and it ought always to be remembered that historic continuity with the past is not a duty, it is only a necessity.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

"Learning and Science", speech at a dinner of the Harvard Law School Association in honor of Professor C. C. Langdell (June 25, 1895); reported in Speeches by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1896). p. 67-68.
1890s

Pleasure , Law , Imagination , Learning

“Gentlemen, to the lady without whom I should never have survived for eighty, nor sixty, nor yet thirty years. Her smile has been my lyric, her understanding, the rhythm of the stanza. She has been the spring wherefrom I have drawn the power to write the words. She is the poem of my life.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Attribution reported in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989), which states that this is not verified in works about him nor in Magnificent Yankee, the film about him. Holmes expressed a similar sentiment in a letter to Sir Frederick Pollock (May 24, 1929): "For sixty years she made life poetry for me". Mark De Wolfe Howe, ed., Holmes-Pollock Letters (1941), vol. 2, p. 243.
Attributions

Life , Smile , Spring , Understanding

“A child's education should begin at least one hundred years before he was born.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

More likely attributable to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Misattributed

Education

“As I grow older I grow calm. If I feel what are perhaps an old man's apprehensions, that competition from new races will cut deeper than working men's disputes and will test whether we can hang together or can fight.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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

Men , Feeling , Fight

“The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree. When a nation is at war many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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

Men , War , Peace , Question

“Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man's nose begins.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Various permutations of this quote have been attributed to Holmes, but its was actually written by Zechariah Chafee, "Freedom of Speech in Wartime", 32 Harvard Law Review 932, 957 (1919).
Misattributed