Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (8 March 1841 - 6 March 1935) American jurist; Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1902 to 1932; often called "The Great Dissenter"; son of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Contents

[edit] Quotes

Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire.
State interference is an evil, where it cannot be shown to be a good.
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.
Man may have cosmic destinies that he does not understand.
The chief end of a man is to frame general ideas — and... no general idea is worth a damn.
To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.

[edit] General sources

  • Get down, you fool!
    • Assertion famously directed at then-President Abraham Lincoln when he came under enemy fire at Fort Stevens during the American Civil War, as quoted in Team of Rivals : The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (2005) by Doris Kearns Goodwin, p. 643.
  • The chief end of a man is to frame general ideas — and... no general idea is worth a damn.
    • Letter to Morris R. Cohen (12 April 1915), as quoted in Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations‎ (2008) edited by Ned Sherrin, p. 169.
  • If I were dying, my last words would be, Have faith and pursue the unknown end.
    • Letter to Jingxiong Wu (1924), published in Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: His Book Notices and Uncollected Letters and Papers (1936) by Harry Clair Shriver, p. 175.
  • Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.
    • Reportedly said by Holmes in a speech in 1904. Alternately phrased as "Taxes are what we pay for civilized society, including the chance to insure", Compania General De Tabacos De Filipinas v. Collector of Internal Revenue, 275 U.S. 87, 100, dissenting; opinion (21 November 1927). The first variation is quoted by the IRS above the entrance to their headquarters at 1111 Constitution Avenue.
  • Young man, the secret of my success is that at an early age I discovered that I was not God.
    • On his 90th birthday to a journalist (8 March 1931), as quoted in Information 2000: Library and Information Services for the 21st Century, Vol. 1991, Part 2 (1992) by the U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science, p. 272.
  • I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy — I don't disparage envy but I don't accept it as legitimately my master.
    • Holmes-Laski Letters : The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Harold J. Laski, 1916 - 1935 (1953), Vol. 2, p. 942.
  • "There's a great deal of difference between a little bit and a lot."
    • Justice Holmes' comment on judging, quoted by Harvard Law Professor Arthur Sutherland, who has been personal secretary to Justice Holmes.[citation needed]
  • 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.
    • "Holmes-Pollock Letters : The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Sir Frederick Pollock, 1874-1932" (2nd ed., 1961), p. 109. Often quoted as "I wouldn't give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity; I would give my right arm for the simplicity on the far side of complexity" and attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

[edit] Judicial opinions

  • Free competition is worth more to society than it costs.
    • Vegelahn v. Guntner, 167 Mass. 92, 44 N.E. 1077, 1080 (1896) (opinion of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts).
  • 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 return.
    • Vegelahn v. Guntner, 167 Mass. 92, 44 N.E. 1077, 1081 (1896) (opinion of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts).
  • The aim of the law is not to punish sins, but is to prevent certain external results.
    • Commonwealth v. Kennedy, 170 Mass. 18, 20 (1897) (opinion of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts).
  • 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 and distorts the judgement.
  • 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.
  • A Constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory . . . It is made for people of fundamentally differing views, and the accident of our finding certain opinions natural and familiar, or novel, and even shocking, ought not to conclude our judgment upon the question whether statutes embodying them conflict with the Constitution of the United States.
  • General propositions do not decide concrete cases.
  • We see what you are driving at, but you have not said it, and therefore we shall go on as before.
    • Johnson v. United States, 163 Fed. 30, 31 (1908).
  • 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.
    • Frank v. Magnum, 237 U.S. 309, 347 (1915).
  • The common law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky, but the articulate voice of some sovereign or quasi sovereign that can be identified; although some decisions with which I have disagreed seem to me to have forgotten the fact.
  • 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.
    • Towne vs. Eisner, 245 U.S. 418, 425 (7 January 1918).
  • The character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done.
  • The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.
  • The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree. When a nation is at war many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.
  • Men must turn square corners when they deal with the Government.
    • Rock Island C.R.R. v. United States, 254 U.S. 141, 143 (22 November 1920).
  • Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife.
    • Brown v. United States, 256 U.S. 335, 343 (16 May 1921).
  • It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.
  • Courts are apt to err by sticking too closely to the words of a law where those words import a policy that goes beyond them.
    • Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 469 (1928) (Holmes, J., dissenting).
  • The elaborate argument against the constitutionality of the Act if interpreted as we read it, in accordance with its obvious meaning does not need an elaborate answer.
    • United States v. Wurzbach, 280 U.S. 396, 399 (1930).
  • The interpretation of constitutional principles must not be too literal. We must remember that the machinery of government would not work if it were not allowed a little play in its joints.
    • Bain Peanut Co. v. Pinson, 282 U.S. 499, 501 (1931).

[edit] Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616 (1919)

We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country.
Dissenting opinion (10 November 1919)
  • It is only the present danger of immediate evil or an intent to bring it about that warrants Congress in setting a limit to the expression of opinion where private rights are not concerned.
    • 250 U.S. at 628.
  • To allow opposition by speech seems to indicate that you think the speech impotent, as when a man says that he has squared the circle, or that you do not care whole-heartedly for the result, or that you doubt either your power or your premises. But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas —that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution.
    • 250 U.S. at 630.
  • I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country.
    • 250 U.S. at 630.
  • Only the emergency that makes it immediately dangerous to leave the correction of evil counsels to time warrants making any exception to the sweeping command, "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech."
    • 250 U.S. at 630-31.

[edit] Books and articles

  • 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 mathematics.
  • State interference is an evil, where it cannot be shown to be a good.
  • To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.
    • "Ideals and Doubts" in Illinois Law Review, Vol. X (1915); also in Collected Legal Papers (1920) edited by Harold Joseph Laski, p. 307.

[edit] "The Path of Law" 10 Harvard Law Review 457 (1897)

  • Certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.
  • The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.
  • 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.
  • 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 the law or outside of it, in the vaguer sanctions of conscience.

[edit] "Natural Law", 32 Harvard Law Review 40, 41 (1918).

  • There is in all men a demand for the superlative, so much so that the poor devil who has no other way of reaching it attains it by getting drunk.
  • Our test of truth is a reference to either a present or an imagined future majority in favor of our view.
  • Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.
  • Deep-seated preferences cannot be argued about — you cannot argue a man into liking a glass of beer — and therefore, when differences are sufficiently far reaching, we try to kill the other man rather than let him have his way. But that is perfectly consistent with admitting that, so far as appears, his grounds are just as good as ours.

[edit] Addresses

  • 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.
  • We know that, if the armies of our war did anything worth remembering, the credit belongs not mainly to the individuals who did it, but to average human nature. We also know very well that we cannot live in associations with the past alone, and we admit that, if we would be worthy of the past, we must find new fields for action or thought, and make for ourselves new careers.
    But, nevertheless, the generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its experience. 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. While we are permitted to scorn nothing but indifference, and do not pretend to undervalue the worldly rewards of ambition, we have seen with our own eyes, beyond and above the gold fields, the snowy heights of honor, and it is for us to bear the report to those who come after us.
    • "In Our Youth Our Hearts Were Touched With Fire", address delivered on Memorial Day (30 May 1884)
  • 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 again in the field. I do not repine. We have shared the incommunicable experience of war; we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top.
  • Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.
    • "Early Forms of Liability," Lecture I from The Common Law. (1909)
  • As I grow older I grow calm. If I feel what are perhaps an old man's apprehensions, that competition from new races will cut deeper than working men's disputes and will test whether we can hang together or can fight.
    • "Law and the Court", speech at a dinner of the Harvard Law School Association of New York (15 February 1913)
  • I think it not improbable that man, like the grub that prepares a chamber for the winged thing it never has seen but is to be — that man may have cosmic destinies that he does not understand.
    • "Law and the Court", speech at a dinner of the Harvard Law School Association of New York (15 February 1913)
  • The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.
  • Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.
    • Address to the Harvard Alumni Association to the Class of '61, in Speeches (1913), p. 96
  • Life is a roar of bargain and battle, but in the very heart of it there rises a mystic spiritual tone that gives meaning to the whole. It transmutes the dull details into romance. It reminds is that our only but wholly adequate significance is as parts of the unimaginable whole. It suggests that even while living we are living to ends outside ourselves
    • Address to the Harvard Alumni Association to the Class of '61, in Speeches (1913), p. 96
  • Life is action, the use of one's powers. As to use them to their height is our joy and duty, so it is the one end that justifies itself.
    • Speech to the Bar Association of Boston, in Speeches (1913), p. 85
  • With all humility, I think, "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might." Infinitely more important than the vain attempt to love one's neighbor as one's self. If you want to hit a bird on the wing, you must have all your will in focus, you must not be thinking about yourself, and equally, you must not be thinking about your neighbor: you must be living in your eye on that bird. Every achievement is a bird on the wing.
    • Speech to the Bar Association of Boston, in Speeches (1913), p. 85
  • 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.
    • Speech to the Bar Association of Boston, in Speeches (1913), p. 86
  • Most men think dramatically, not quantitatively, a fact that the rich would be wise to remember more than they do. We are apt to contrast the palace with the hovel, the dinner at Sherry's with the workingman's pail, and never ask how much or realize how little is withdrawn to make the prizes of success. (Subordinate prizes — since the only prize much cared for by the powerful is power. The prize of the general is not a bigger tent, but command.)
    • Address at the dinner of the Harvard Law School Association of New York City (15 February 1913)

[edit] Attributed

  • Lawyers spend their professional careers shoveling smoke.
    • Attributed in Watergate and the White House, Volumes 1-2‎ (1973) by Edward W. Knappman, p. 100; this has also become paraphrased as "Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke."


[edit] Misattributed

Many quotes attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. were actually authored by his father, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., a popular author.

  • The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract.
  • Beware how you take away hope from any human being.
    • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., in his valedictory address to medical graduates at Harvard University (10 March 1858), published in The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal Vol. LVIII, No. 8 (25 March 1858), p. 158; this has also been paraphrased "Beware how you take away hope from another human being."
  • A moment's insight is sometimes worth a lifetime's experience.
  • Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children.
    • A paraphrase of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., in "The Poet at the Breakfast-Table" in The Atlantic Monthly Vol. 29 (1872), p. 231: "I like children, — he said to me one day at table. — I like 'em, and I respect 'em. Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by them."
  • To be 70 years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be 40 years old.
    • Almost certainly attributable to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., who is, in various sources, credited with having said this in letters to Harriet Beecher Stowe (who turned 70 in 1881) and Julia Ward Howe (who turned 70 in 1889), as well as having made the commented about himself. Holmes, Sr. reached the age of 70 in 1879, while Holmes, Jr. reached that age in 1911, some time after the earliest reports of this quote.
  • A child's education should begin at least one hundred years before he was born.
  • There is no friend like an old friend who has shared our morning days, no greeting like his welcome, no homage like his praise.
  • A man's mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions.
    • Also reported as "One's mind" instead of "A man's mind", and "can never go back" or "never regains" instead of "never goes back"; most likely properly attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
  • Old age is always fifteen years older than I am.
  • Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man's nose begins.
    • Various permutations of this quote have been attributed to Holmes, but its was actually written by Zechariah Chafee, "Freedom of Speech in Wartime", 32 Harvard Law Review 932, 957 (1919).
  • Keep government poor and remain free.
    • Attributed to Holmes in a speech by Ronald Reagan (June 15,1982); reported as a misattribution by Paul F. Boller, Jr., and John George, They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, & Misleading Attributions (1989), p. 46-47.

[edit] About

  • While a judge of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, when he found the long-winded speeches of the lawyers especially trying, he advised them gravely to take a course of reading risque books, that they might learn to say things by innuendo.
    • Reported in Silas Bent, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (1932), p. 16.

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