“When twenty years ago a vague terror went over the earth and the word socialism began to be heard, I thought and still think that fear was translated into doctrines that had no proper place in the Constitution or the common law. Judges are apt to be naif, simple-minded men, and they need something of Mephistopheles. We too need education in the obvious—to learn to transcend our own convictions and to leave room for much that we hold dear to be done away with short of revolution by the orderly change of law.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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

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Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. 107

United States Supreme Court justice 1841–1935

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Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. 107

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