Oliver Wendell Holmes

State interference is an evil, where it cannot be shown to be a good.

The degree of civilization which a people has reached, no doubt, is marked by their anxiety to do as they would be done by.

The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience... The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of …

It is the merit of the common law that it decides the case first and determines the principle afterwards.

But as precedents survive like the clavicle in the cat, long after the use they once served is at an end, and the reason for them has been forgotten, the result of following them must often be failure and confusion from the merely logical …

There are not infrequent times when a bottle of wine, a good dinner, a girl of some trivial sort can fill the hour for me.