Quote#Freedom
The liberty of the citizen to do as he likes so long as he does not…
Quote byOliver Wendell Holmes · 1841–1935
Commonly attributed — not confirmed in an authoritative edition. Cited on Wikiquote to: Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905), 198 U.S. at 79..
English (original)
The liberty of the citizen to do as he likes so long as he does not interfere with the liberty of others to do the same, which has been a shibboleth for some well known writers, is interfered with by school laws, by the Post Office, by every state or municipal institution which takes his money for purposes thought desirable, whether he likes it or not.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes
More from Oliver Wendell Holmes
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.
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 …
The degree of civilization which a people has reached, no doubt, is marked by their anxiety to do as they would be done by.
State interference is an evil, where it cannot be shown to be a good.
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.