Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Quotes

A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.

The greatest act of faith is when a man understands he is not God.

The mark of a civilized man is his willingness to re-examine his most cherished beliefs.

My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins.

Success. Is not the position where you are standing, but which direction you are going.

Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.

This is a court of law, not a court of justice.

Young men know the rules, but old men know the exceptions.

I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it, but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.

If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought, not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.

Certitude leads to violence. This is a proposition that has an easy application and a difficult one. The easy application is to ideoologues, dogmatists, and bullies--people who think that their rigtness justifies them in imposing on anyone who does not happen to suscribe to their particular ideology, dogma or notion of turf. If the conviction of rightness is powerful enough, resistance to it will be met, sooner or later by force. There are people like this in every sphere of life, and it is natural to feel that the world would be a better place without them!

The history of intellectual growth and discovery clearly demonstrates the need for unfettered freedom, the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable. To curtail free expression strikes twice at intellectual freedom, for whoever deprives another of the right to state unpopular views necessarily also deprives others of the right to listen to those views.

I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.

The noblest service comes from nameless hands; and the best servant does his work unseen.

Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.

The man of action has the present, but the thinker controls the future.

Lawyers spend their professional careers shoveling smoke.

If you don't know what you want, you will probably never get it.

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

Free competition is worth more to society than it costs.

Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.

The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.

A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.

Between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force.

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