Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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, and as Acting Chief Justice of the United States January–February 1930. Noted for his long service, his concise and pithy opinions and his deference to the decisions of elected legislatures, he is one of the most widely cited United States Supreme Court justices in history, particularly for his "clear and present danger" opinion for a...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJudge
Date of Birth8 March 1841
CountryUnited States of America
The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts, but learning how to make facts live.
A new untruth is better than an old truth.
The great act of faith is when a man decides he is not God.
The rules of evidence in the main are based on experience, logic, and common sense, less hampered by history than some parts of the substantive law.
My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins.
There is a little plant called reverence in the corner of my soul's garden, which I love to have watered once a week.
Why should you row a boat race? Why endure the long months of pain in preparation for a fierce half hour that will leave you all but dead? Does anyone ask the question? Is there anyone who would not go through all the costs, and more, for the moment when anguish breaks into triumph or even for the glory of having nobly lost? Is life less than a boat race? If a man will give the blood in his body to win the one, will he spend all the might of his soul to prevail in the other?
This is a court of law, not a court of justice.
Certitude leads to violence. This is a proposition that has an easy application and a difficult one. The easy application is to ideoologues, dogmatists, and bullies--people who think that their rigtness justifies them in imposing on anyone who does not happen to suscribe to their particular ideology, dogma or notion of turf. If the conviction of rightness is powerful enough, resistance to it will be met, sooner or later by force. There are people like this in every sphere of life, and it is natural to feel that the world would be a better place without them!
Success. Is not the position where you are standing, but which direction you are going.
Apologizing - a very desperate habit - one that is rarely cured. Apology is only egotism wrong side out.
Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.
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.
The history of what the law has been is necessary to the knowledge of what the law is.