Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was an American jurist who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1902 to 1932. He is considered one of the most influential American common law judges, and is one of the most cited legal scholars of the 20th century. Holmes is best known for his clear and influential opinions, and for his "clear and present danger" doctrine, which has been used to evaluate the limits of free speech. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. on freedom, democracy, education.
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Top 10 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Quotes
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Quotes About Freedom
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Quotes About Education
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Quotes About Life
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Quotes About Love
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Quotes About Lawful
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Quotes About Living
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Quotes About Word
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Quotes About Worth
Short Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Quotes
Life Lessons
Famous Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Quotes
Top 10 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Quotes
Where we love is home - home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.
The greatest thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.
Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.
Have the courage to act instead of react.
Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children.
To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.
Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children.
Some people are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good.
A river is more than an amenity, it is a treasure.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Quotes About Freedom
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. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas [and] the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may thing what we like and say what we think. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Quotes About Education
The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
A child's education should begin at least one hundred years before he is born. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
There are many things which we can afford to forget which it is yet well to learn. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Quotes About Life
The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
To us who remain behind is left this day of memories. Every year--in the full tide of spring, at the height of the symphony of flowers and love and life--there comes a pause, and through the silence we hear the lonely pipe of death. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes life worth living. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
We are all sentenced to capital punishment for the crime of living, and though the condemned cell of our earthly existence is but a narrow and bare dwelling-place, we have adjusted ourselves to it, and made it tolerably comfortable for the little while we are to be confined in it. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Quotes About Love
Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Don't you stay at home of evenings? Don't you love a cushioned seat in a corner, by the fireside, with your slippers on your feet? — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
There is a little plant called reverence in the corner of my soul's garden, which I love to have watered once a week. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Where we love is home, home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Love is the master key which opens the gates of happiness. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Love prefers twilight to daylight. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Youth fades; love droops, the leaves of friendship fall; A mother's secret hope outlives them all. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Men are tattooed with their special beliefs like so many South Sea Islanders; but a real human heart with divine love in it beats with the same glow under all the patterns of all earth's thousand tribes. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Quotes About Lawful
This is a court of law young man, not a court of justice. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Whatever disagreement there may be as to the scope of the phrase "due process of law" there can be no doubt that it embraces the fundamental conception of a fair trial, with opportunity to be heard. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The rule of joy and the law of duty seem to me all one. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
It cannot be helped, it is as it should be, that the law is behind the times. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
It is revolting to have no better reason for a rule of law than that so it was laid down in the time of Henry IV. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
But the word "right" is one of the most deceptive of pitfalls; it is so easy to slip from a qualified meaning in the premise to an unqualified one in the conclusion. Most rights are qualified. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
It is perfectly easy to be original by violating the laws of decency and the canons of good taste. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
If you can eat sawdust without butter, you can be a success in the law. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Quotes About Living
Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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 the time in which it is used. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
How many people live on the reputation of the reputation they might have made! — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Simple people... are very quick to see the live facts which are going on about them. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
To live is to function. That is all there is in living. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
As life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time, at the peril of being not to have lived. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Several years before birth, advertise for a couple of parents belonging to long-lived families. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Quotes About Word
Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Carve every word before you let it fall. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Science ... in other words, knowledge-is not the enemy of religion; for, if so, then religion would mean ignorance. But it is often the antagonist of school-divinity. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Men are idolaters, and want something to look at and kiss and hug, or throw themselves down before; they always did, they always will; and if you don't make it of wood, you must make it of words. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Men are idolaters and want something to look at and kiss and hug, or throw themselves down before; they always did, they always will; and if you don't make it out of wood, you must make it out of words. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide --that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life --are alike forbidden. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Gentlemen, to the lady without whom I should never have survived for eighty, nor sixty, nor yet thirty years. Her smile has been my lyric, her understanding, the rhythm of the stanza. She has been the spring wherefrom I have drawn the power to write the words. She is the poem of my life. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Quotes About Worth
A page of history is worth a pound of logic. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
It is faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth looking at. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The man who is always worrying about whether or not his soul would be damned generally has a soul that isn't worth a damn. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirms the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
A new and valid idea is worth more than a regiment and fewer men can furnish the former than command the latter. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Man is born a predestined idealist, for he is born to act. To act is to affirm the worth of an end, and to persist in affirming the worth of an end is to make an ideal. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
I hate facts. I always say the chief end of man is to form general propositions - adding that no general proposition is worth a damn. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The man who is always worrying whether or not his soul would be damned generally has a soul that isn't worth a damn. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
I hate facts. I always say the chief end of man is to form general propositions -- adding that no general proposition is worth a damn. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
I dare say that I have worked off my fundamental formula on you that the chief end of man is to frame general propositions and that no general proposition is worth a damn. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Famous Quotes And Sayings
Fame is the scentless sunflower, with gaudy crown of gold; But friendship is the rose, with sweets in every fold. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Have the courage to act instead of react. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
There is no friend like the old friend, who has shared our morning days,
No greeting like his welcome, no homage like his praise:
Fame is the scentless sunflower, with gaudy crown of gold;
But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Reason means truth and those who are not governed by it
take the chance that someday the sunken fact will rip
the bottom out of their boat. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The provisions of the Constitution are not mathematical formulas having their essence in their form; they are organic, living institutions transplanted from English soil. Their significance is vital, not formal; it is to be gathered not simply by taking the words and a dictionary, but by considering their origin and the line of their growth. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Reason may be the lever, but sentiment gives you the fulcrum and the place to stand on if you want to move the world. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
A river is more than an amenity, it is a treasure. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
For my part I think it is a less evil that some criminals should escape, than that the government should play an ignoble part. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour on it, the more it will contract. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The Amen of nature is always a flower. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle that fits them all. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a great deal longer. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
There was never an idea started that woke up men out of their stupid indifference but its originator was spoken of as a crank. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The man of action has the present, but the thinker controls the future. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Man has will, but woman has her way. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Beware how you take away hope from another human being. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Liberty is often a heavy burden on a man. It involves the necessity for perpetual choice which is the kind of labor men have always dreaded. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
No generalization is wholly true—not even this one. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what to do with genius. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Young men know the rules, but old men know the exceptions. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Old age is fifteen years older than I am. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Old age is fifteen years older than I am. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Man's mind, stretched by a new idea, never goes back to its original dimensions. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
There is no time like the old time, when you and I were young! — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Eloquence may set fire to reason. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Every calling is great when greatly pursued. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I wouldn't pass it around. Wouldn't be doing anybody a favor. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't say embrace trouble. That's as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say, meet it as a friend, for you'll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe...that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market... That at any rate is the theory of our constitution. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Apologizing - a very desperate habit - one that is rarely cured. Apology is only egotism wrong side out. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
When I want to understand what is happening today or try to decide what will happen tomorrow, I look back. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
History has to be rewritten because history is the selection of those threads of causes or antecedents that we are interested in. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most important thing in the end. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Longevity is having a chronic disease - and taking care of it. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Leisure only means a chance to do other jobs that demand attention. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
To brag little, to lose well, / To crow gently if in luck, / To pay up, to own up, / To shut up if beaten, / Are the virtues of a sportingman. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Age, like distance lends a double charm. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Stupidity often saves a man from going mad. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
If you don't know what you want, you will probably never get it. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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.
Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Old age is like an opium dream. Nothing seems real except the unreal. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Memory is a net: one that finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook, but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may think what we like and say what we think. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Beware of making your moral staple consist of the negative virtues. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Under bad manners, as under graver faults, lies very commonly an overestimate of our special individuality, as distinguished from our generic humanity. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Lord, bid war's trumpet cease; Fold the whole earth in peace. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
You make me chuckle when you say that you are no longer young, that you have turned twenty-four. A man is or may be young to after sixty, and not old before eighty. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Life Lessons by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. taught the importance of clear and logical thinking, emphasizing the importance of facts and evidence when making decisions.
He also stressed the importance of understanding the context and implications of one's decisions, and the need to be open-minded and consider all perspectives.
Lastly, he taught the importance of being humble and respecting the opinions of others, even when they differ from one's own.
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