34 Thought-Provoking Quotes By Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., The Great Dissenter
I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.
The young man knows the rules but the old man knows the exceptions.
Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.
I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy.
A child's education should begin at least 100 years before he was born.
A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in colour and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.
The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract.
The great thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are going.
Don’t flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.
Every calling is great when greatly pursued.
The first requirement of a sound body of law is, that it should correspond with the actual feelings and demands of the community, whether right or wrong.
We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.
The man of action has the present, but the thinker controls the future.
We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep to the real and the true.
To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.
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.
We have shared the incommunicable experience of war, we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top. In our youth our hearts were touched with fire.
Three generations of imbeciles are enough.
Most people are willing to take the Sermon on the Mount as a flag to sail under, but few will use it as a rudder by which to steer.
We have to choose, and for my part I think it a less evil that some criminals should escape than that the government should play an ignoble part.
Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.
The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.
A man who called everyone a damn fool is like a man who damns the weather. He only shows that he is not adapted to his environment, not that the environment is wrong.
Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.
A goose flies by a chart the Royal Geographic Society could not improve.
I believe that there are no innate, intrinsic differences among a human being , a baboon or a grain of sand.
Every year, if not every day, we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge.
The very minute a thought is threatened with publicity it seems to shrink towards mediocrity.
Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.
We are very quiet there, but it is the quiet of a storm centre. .
