Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.: Quotes about men

“I always say you can get your tragedy of any desired length in England, from thirty seconds to a lifetime. I had one adorable one of twenty-nine minutes by the watch. At the end of that time I started for my train. Woman I'd had a glimpse of in London — walk. She sat on a style, I below her, gazing into her eyes — then, "remember this lane," "while memory holds its seat, etc." "Adieu." And I still do and ever shall remember her, and I rather think she does me a little bit. What imbecilities for an old fellow to be talking. But if one knows his place and makes way for younger men when he isn't sure, it is better perhaps not quite to abandon interest in the sports of life.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Letter to Sir Frederick Pollock (23 August 1895); reported in Holmes-Pollock Letters: The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Sir Frederick Pollock (1961) edited by Mark De Wolfe Howe, Vol. 1, p. 60; also reported in The Mind and Faith of Justice Holmes: His Speeches, Essays, Letters, and Judicial Opinions (1954), p. 437.
1890s

Life , Men , Way , Thinking

“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)

Men , Way

“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)

Men , Books

“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

“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

“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)

Men , Truth , Faith , Idea

“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