Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841–1935) was an American jurist who served as American Supreme Court associate justice 1902–32. The son of the well-known physician and essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Holmes, Jr. became renowned for his sharp, articulate, and dissenting opinions.
Born in Boston, Holmes, Jr. was a professor of law at Harvard, chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court 1899–1902, before becoming an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. During his 30 year-long tenure on the Supreme Court, he became acknowledged as one of the most distinguished jurists of the age. Holmes, Jr. has been called “The Great Dissenter” because of the brilliance of his dissenting opinions.
As a jurist and a legal writer, Holmes, Jr. also contributed to the debate in the early 20th century concerning the role of law in a rapidly changing America. His works include The Common Law (1881,) Speeches (1891, 1913,) and Collected Legal Papers (1920.) Touched with Fire (1946) collects his Civil War diary and letters.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Leisure only means a chance to do other jobs that demand attention.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Leisure
For me at least there came moments when faith wavered. But there is the great lesson and the great triumph: keep the fire burning until, by and by, out of the mass of sordid details there comes some result.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Endurance, Resolve, Perseverance
I like to pay taxes. With them I buy civilization.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Taxes
When in doubt, do it.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Uncertainty, Doubt
Imitation is a necessity of human nature.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Imitation, Role models
The minute a phrase, becomes current, it becomes an apology for not thinking accurately to the end of the sentence.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Thoughts, Thought
If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I wouldn’t pass it around. Wouldn’t be doing anybody a favor. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don’t say embrace trouble. That’s as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say, meet it as a friend, for you’ll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Adversity, Trouble
This is a court of law young man, not a court of justice.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Justice, Lawyers, Law
Consciously or unconsciously we all strive to make the kind of a world we like.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Action
Man is born a predestined idealist, for he is born to act. To act is to affirm the worth of an end, and to persist in affirming the worth of an end is to make an ideal.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Idealism, Ideals
Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most important thing in the end.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Theory, Assumptions
Our dead brothers still live for us and bid us think of life, not death—of life to which in their youth they lent the passion and glory of Spring. As I listen, the great chorus of life and joy begins again, and amid the awful orchestra of seen and unseen powers and destinies of good and evil, our trumpets, sound once more a note of daring, hope, and will.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Remembrance
For, stripped of the temporary associations which gave rise to it, 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 our country in return.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Service
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.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Time, Youth
Fresh air and innocence are good if you don’t take too much of them—but I always remember that most of the achievements and pleasures of life are in bad air.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Pleasure
It is better to be seventy years young than forty years old!
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
I always say, as you know, that if my fellow citizens want to go to Hell I will help them. It’s my job.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The power to tax is not the power to destroy while this Court sits.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Life and Living, Ability, Passion, Life, Getting Going, Sharing, Inaction, Procrastination
Every living sentence which shows a mind at work for itself is to be welcomed. It is not the first use but the tiresome repetition of inadequate catch words which I am observing—phrases which originally were contributions, but which, by their very felicity, delay further analysis for fifty years. That comes from the same source as dislike of novelty—intellectual indolence or weakness—a slackening in the eternal pursuit of the more exact.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Passion, Equality
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.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Opinion, Opinions
Great constitutional provisions must be administered with caution. Some play must be allowed for the joints of the machine, and it must be remembered that legislatures are ultimate guardians of the liberties and welfare of the people in quite as great a degree as the courts.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
I confess that I do not understand the principle on which the power to fix a minimum for the wages of women can be denied by those who admit the power to fix a maximum for their hours of work. I fully assent to the proposition that here as elsewhere the distinctions of the law are distinctions of degree, but I perceive no difference in the kind or degree of interference with liberty, the only matter with which we have any concern, between the one case and the other. The bargain is equally affected whichever half you regulate…. It will need more than the Nineteenth Amendment to convince me that there are no differences between men and women, or that legislation cannot take those differences into account.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
A river is more than an amenity, it is a treasure. It offers a necessity of life that must be rationed among those who have power over it.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Water, One liners
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.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Humility, Focus, Concentration
The general rule, at least, is that while property may be regulated to a certain extent, if regulation goes too far it will be recognized as a taking.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
A new untruth is better than an old truth.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Truth
The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Integrity
A question like the present should be disposed of without undue delay. But a State cannot be expected to move with the celerity of a private business man; it is enough if it proceeds, in the language of the English Chancery, with all deliberate speed.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
There are many things which we can afford to forget which it is yet well to learn.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Learning
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.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Business
Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Civilization
The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Education
For I say unto you in all sadness of conviction that to think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists. Only when you have worked alone—when you have felt around you are a black gulf of solitude more isolating than that which surrounds the dying man, and in hope and despair have trusted to your own unshaken will—then only can you gain the secret isolated joy of the thinker, who knows that a hundred years after he is dead and forgotten men who have never heard of him will be moving to the measure of his thought—the subtle rapture of postponed power, which the world knows not because it has no external trappings, but which to his prophetic vision is more real than that which commands an army. And if this joy should not be yours, still it is only thus you can know that you have done what lay in you to do—can say that you have lived, and be ready for the end.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Purpose
The secret of my success is that at an early age I discovered I was not God.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Realization, Acceptance, Awareness
A new and valid idea is worth more than a regiment and fewer men can furnish the former than command the latter.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Ideas
Even the wisest woman you talk to is ignorant of something you may know, but an elegant woman never forgets her elegance.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Wealth
Realize life as an end in itself. Functioning is all there is.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Value of Time, Time Management
History has to be rewritten because history is the selection of those threads of causes or antecedents that we are interested in.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: History
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