Oliver Wendell Holmes

Philosophy may have gained by the attempts in recent years to look through the fiction to the fact and to generalize corporations, partnerships, and other groups into a single conception. But to generalize is to omit, and, in this …

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

I can't help preferring champagne to ditch water — I doubt if the universe does.

Constitutions are intended to preserve practical and substantial rights, not to maintain theories.

Great cases like hard cases make bad law. For great cases are called great, not by reason of their importance in shaping the law of the future, but because of some accident of immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings …

Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.

Nature has but one judgment on wrong conduct — if you can call that a judgment which seemingly has no reference to conduct as such — the judgment of death.

One has to try to strike the jugular and let the rest go.

How odious a virtue the much praised simplicity. The only simplicity for which I would give a straw is that which is on the other side of the complex — not that which never has divined it.

The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race.

The object of our study, then, is prediction, the prediction of the incidence of the public force through the instrumentality of the courts.

When we study law we are not studying a mystery but a well-known profession.

If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which such knowledge enables him to predict, not as a good one, who finds his reasons for conduct, whether inside …

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 advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.

Certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.

The aim of the law is not to punish sins, but is to prevent certain external results.

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.

One of the eternal conflicts out of which life is made up is that between the effort of every man to get the most he can for his services, and that of society, disguised under the name of capital, to get his services for the least possible …

Free competition is worth more to society than it costs.

As for us, our days of combat are over. Our swords are rust. Our guns will thunder no more. The vultures that once wheeled over our heads must be buried with their prey. Whatever of glory must be won in the council or the closet, never …

Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire.

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.

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.