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.
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Systems die; instincts remain.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Emotions, Instincts, Reason
It cannot be helped, it is as it should be, that the law is behind the times.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
When I wanted to understand what is happening today, I try to decide what will happen tomorrow; I look back, a page of history is worth a volume of logic.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: History, Reflection, Past, Understanding
A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Words
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: Getting Going, Ability, Life and Living, Passion, Life, Procrastination, Inaction, Sharing
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: Concentration, Humility, Focus
On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirms the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Life and Living
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
Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Lawyers, Law
People talk fundamentals and superlatives and then make some changes of detail.
—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.
Most of us retain enough of the theological attitude to think that we are little gods.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Humility
A man is usually more careful of his money than of his principles.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Integrity, Money
The secret of my success is that at an early age I discovered I was not God.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Awareness, Acceptance, Realization
I have always sought to guide the future— but it is very lonely sometimes trying to play God.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Loneliness, Future
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
Nature has but one judgment on wrong conduct — if you can call that a judgment which seemingly has no reference to conduct as such — the judgment of death.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our father’s have done them or our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a large part than what we suspect of what we think.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Expectation
When in doubt, do it.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Uncertainty, Doubt
Our morality seems to be only a check on the ultimate domination of force, just as our politeness is a check on the impulse of every pig to put his feet in the trough.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Morality
The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Integrity
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
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.
Leisure only means a chance to do other jobs that demand attention.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Leisure
To have doubted one’s own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Doubt
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.
When twenty years ago a vague terror went over the earth and the word socialism began to be heard, I thought and still think that fear was translated into doctrines that had no proper place in the Constitution or the common law. Judges are apt to be naif, simple-minded men, and they need something of Mephistopheles. We too need education in the obvious—to learn to transcend our own convictions and to leave room for much that we hold dear to be done away with short of revolution by the orderly change of law.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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
The great act of faith is when a man decides that he is not God.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Faith, Belief
Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most important thing in the end.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Theory, Assumptions
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