Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (8 March 1841 - 6 March 1935) American jurist; Justice of U.S. Supreme Court (1902 -1932) often called "The Great Dissenter"; son of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Sourced

• Get down, you fool!
  • Directed at then-President Abraham Lincoln when he came under enemy fire at Fort Stevens during the Civil War. Reported in Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), p. 643.

• The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.
  • The Common Law (1881), p. 1.

• State interference is an evil, where it cannot be shown to be a good.
  • The Common Law (1881), p. 88-96.

• Free competition is worth more to society than it costs.
  • Vegelahn v. Guntner, 167 Mass. 92, 44 N.E. 1077, 1080 (1896) (opinion of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts).

• For the rational study of the law the blackletter man may be the man of the present, but the man of the future is the man of statistics and the master of economics.
  • "The Path of Law" 10 Harvard Law Review 457 (1897).

• We see what you are driving at, but you have not said it, and therefore we shall go on as before.
  • Johnson v. United States, 163 Fed. 30, 31 (1908).

• But 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.
  • "Law and the Court", speech at a dinner of the Harvard Law School Association of New York on February 15, 1913.

• I think it not improbable that man, like the grub that prepares a chamber for the winged thing it never has seen but is to be — that man may have cosmic destinies that he does not understand.
  • "Law and the Court", speech at a dinner of the Harvard Law School Association of New York on February 15, 1913.

• Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.
  • "Natural Law", 32 Harvard Law Review 40, 41 (1918). Reprinted in Alfred Lief, ed., The Dissenting Opinions of Mr. Justice Holmes (1929), p. xiv.

• The character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done.
  • Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47, 52 (1919) (opinion published 3 March 1919).

• The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.
  • Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47, 52 (1919) (opinion published 3 March 1919).

• 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.
  • Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47, 52 (1919) (opinion published 3 March 1919).

• Men must turn square corners when they deal with the Government.
  • Rock Island C.R.R. v. United States, 254 U.S. 141, 143 (1920) (published November 22, 1920).

• Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife.
  • Brown v. United States, 256 U.S. 335, 343 (1921) (published May 16, 1921).

• It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.
  • Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200, 207 (1927).

• Three generations of imbeciles are enough.
  • Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200, 207 (1927) (endorsing Virginia's eugenics program).

• [C]ourts are apt to err by sticking too closely to the words of a law where those words import a policy that goes beyond them.
  • Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 469 (1928) (Holmes, J., dissenting).

• The common law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky, but the articulate voice of some sovereign or quasi sovereign that can be identified; although some decisions with which I have disagreed seem to me to have forgotten the fact.
  • Southern Pacific Company v. Jensen 244 U.S. 205, 222 (1917) (Holmes, J., dissenting; opinion published May 21, 1917).

• [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.
  • Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45, 76 (1905)(Holmes, J., dissenting).

• General propositions do not decide concrete cases.
  • Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45, 76 (1905)(Holmes, J., dissenting).

• [A] page of history is worth a volume of logic.
  • New York Trust Co. v. Eisner, 256 U.S. 345, 349 (1921).

• 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.
  • "Natural Law", Collected legal papers, 1921.

• Eloquence may set fire to reason.
  • Gitlow v. People of New York, 268 U.S. 652 (1925).

• Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.
  • Reportedly said by Holmes in a speech in 1904. Alternately phrased as "Taxes are what we pay for civilized society, including the chance to insure", Compania General De Tabacos De Filipinas v. Collector of Internal Revenue, 275 U.S. 87, 100 (1927) (Holmes, J, dissenting; opinion published November 21, 1927). The first variation is quoted by the IRS above the entrance to their headquarters at 1111 Constitution Avenue.

• The power to tax is not the power to destroy while this Court sits.
  • Panhandle Oil Co. v. Mississippi ex rel. Knox 277 U.S. 233 (1928).

• ...certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man. The Path of the Law, 10 Harv. L. Rev. 457 (1897)

Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616 (1919)

Holmes, J., dissenting; published November 10, 1919.

• It is only the present danger of immediate evil or an intent to bring it about that warrants Congress in setting a limit to the expression of opinion where private rights are not concerned.
  • 250 U.S. at 628.

• 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.
  • 250 U.S. at 630.

• I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country.
  • 250 U.S. at 630.

• Only the emergency that makes it immediately dangerous to leave the correction of evil counsels to time warrants making any exception to the sweeping command, "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech."
  • 250 U.S. at 630-31.

• Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.
  • "Early Forms of Liability," Lecture I from The Common Law.

Attributed

• Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.
  • Reported by various sources as a comment made by Holmes; alternately reported as "Lawyers spend their professional careers shoveling smoke."

• A second class mind, but a first class temperament.
  • Opinion of Theodore Roosevelt, expressed in letters, but not recorded in this form.

  Often incorrectly stated as his opinion of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  The Essential Holmes, by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Richard A. Posner, p. xiv–xv.

Unsourced

• ...it is now the moment when by common consent we pause to become conscious of our national life and to rejoice in it, to recall what our country has done for each of us, and to ask ourselves what we can do for the country in return.
  • "In Our Youth Our Hearts Were Touched With Fire", address delivered on Memorial Day, May 30, 1884, at Keene, NH, before John Sedgwick Post No. 4, Grand Army of the Republic.

• The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.
  • As quoted by the Sioux City Journal, 6 Jul 2008, p. A8

• [Law] corresponds at any given time with what is understood to be convenient. That involves continual change, and there can be no eternal order.

• I happen to prefer champagne to ditchwater, but there is no reason to suppose that the cosmos does.
  • As quoted by William F. Buckley, Jr. http://www.nationalreview.com/flashback/flashback200501030730.asp

• We have shared the incommunicable experience of war. . . we have felt, we still feel the passion of life to its top. In our youths, our hearts were touched with fire.
  • "In Our Youth Our Hearts Were Touched With Fire", address delivered on Memorial Day, May 30, 1884, at a meeting called by the Graduating Class of Harvard College.

• Most people think mostly what they want to think the majority of the time.

• The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins.

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

• A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanging, 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.

• Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.

• Death tugs at my ears and says: "Live, I am coming!"

• I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy.

• If I were dying, my last words would be, Have faith and pursue the unknown end.

• It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes life worth living.

• Life is action and passion; therefore it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of the time, at peril of being judged not to have lived.

• 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.

• Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our fathers have done them or our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a larger part than what we suspect of what we think.

• Our test of truth is a reference to either a present or imagined future majority in favour of our view.

• Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children.

• The advice of their elders to young men is very apt to be as unread as a list of the hundred best books.

• The chief end of a man is to frame general ideas— and... no general idea is worth a damn.

• The great act of faith is when a man decides he is not God.

• 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 only prize much cared for by the powerful is power.

• The riders in a race do not stop short when they reach the goal. There is a little finishing canter before coming to a standstill. There is time to hear the kind voice of friends and to say to one's self: "The work is done."

• This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice.

• To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.

• Where we love is home, home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.

• 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.

• Young man, the secret of my success is that at an early age I discovered that I was not God.

• I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.

Misattributed

• Beware how you take away hope from any human being.
  • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., in his valedictory address to medical graduates at Harvard University (10 March 1858), published in The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal Vol. LVIII, No. 8 (25 March 1858), p. 158; this has also been paraphrased "Beware how you take away hope from another human being."

• A child's education should begin at least one hundred years before he was born.
  • More likely attributable to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr..

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

• Old age is always fifteen years older than I am.
  • Actually by financier Bernard Baruch.

• There is no friend like an old friend who has shared our morning days, no greeting like his welcome, no homage like his praise.
  • Attributable to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Kessinger Publishing, 2005.

• To be 70 years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be 40 years old.
  • Almost certainly attributable to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., who is, in various sources, credited with having said this in letters to Harriet Beecher Stowe (who turned 70 in 1881) and Julia Ward Howe (who turned 70 in 1889), as well as having made the commented about himself. Holmes, Sr. reached the age of 70 in 1879, while Holmes, Jr. reached that age in 1911, some time after the earliest reports of this quote.