Our latest collection of Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes.
Table of Contents
Who was Oliver Wendell Holmes?
Oliver Wendell Holmes was an American jurist and legal scholar who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1902 to 1932.
He is one of the most widely cited U.S. Supreme Court justices and most influential American common law judges in history, noted for his long service, pithy opinions—particularly those on civil liberties and American constitutional democracy—and deference to the decisions of elected legislatures.
Holmes retired from the court at the age of 90, an unbeaten record for the oldest justice on the Supreme Court
His position, distinctive personality, and writing style made him a popular figure, especially with American progressives.
27 Best Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
- “I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.” -Oliver Wendell Holmes
2. “The great thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are going.”
3. “The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract.”
4. “The young man knows the rules but the old man knows the exceptions.”
5. “The man of action has the present, but the thinker controls the future.”
6. “Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.”
7. “I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy.”
8. “A child’s education should begin at least 100 years before he was born.”
9. “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 time in which it is used.”
10. “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”
11. “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.”
12. “We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand if we are to keep to the real and the true.”
13. “Don’t flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.”
14. “We have shared the incommunicable experience of war, we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top. In our youth, our hearts were touched with fire.”
15. “Every calling is great when greatly pursued.”
16. “We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.”
17. “To have doubted one’s own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.”
18. “Most people are willing to take the Sermon on the Mount as a flag to sail under, but few will use it as a rudder by which to steer.”
19. “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.”
20. “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.”
21. “Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.”
22. “Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief and if believed it is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at birth. Eloquence may set fire to reason.”
23. “Between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force.”
24. “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. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
25. “The first requirement of a sound body of law is, that it should correspond with the actual feelings and demands of the community, whether right or wrong.”
26. “Greatness is not in where we stand but in what direction we are moving. We must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it—but sail we must and not drift, nor lie at anchor.”
27. “We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of superstitious fears which were implanted in his imagination, no matter how utterly his reason may reject them.”
23 Inspirational Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes (Sayings)
2. “Young man, the secret of my success is that at an early age I discovered that I was not God.” -Oliver Wendell Holmes
3. “The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.”
4. “A goose flies by a chart the Royal Geographic Society could not improve.”
5. “I believe that there are no innate, intrinsic differences among a human being , a baboon or a grain of sand.”
6. “Every man has a right to do what he wills, provided he interferes not with a like right on the part of his neighbors.”
7. “Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.”
8. “We have to choose, and for my part I think it a less evil that some criminals should escape than that the government should play an ignoble part.”
9. “Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.”
10. “Academic life is but half life it is a withdrawal from the fight to utter smart things that cost you nothing except the thinking them from a cloister.”
11. “The rational study of law is still to a large extent the study of history. History must be a part of the study, because without it we cannot know the precise scope of rules which it is our business to know.”
12. “A man who called everyone a damn fool is like a man who damns the weather. He only shows that he is not adapted to his environment, not that the environment is wrong.”
13. “If my fellow citizens want to go to Hell I will help them. Its my job.”
14. “I detest a man who knows that he knows.”
15. “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.”
16. “The very minute a thought is threatened with publicity it seems to shrink towards mediocrity.”
17. “The great thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are moving.”
18. “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 time in which it is used.”
19.“The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law.”
20. “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.”
21. “We are very quiet there, but it is the quiet of a storm centre. .”
23. “Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our fathers have done them or our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a larger part than what we suspect of what we think.”
Top 9 Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
- “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.”
2. “The petitioner may have a constitutional right to talk politics, but he has no constitutional right to be a policeman.”
3. “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.”
4. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
5. “if one of two or more joint wrongdoers has to pay all the damages, he cannot recover contribution from his fellows.”
6. “A page of history is worth a pound of logic.” -Oliver Wendell Holmes
7. “Pretty much all law consists in forbidding men to do something that they want to do.”
8. “El estudio racional del derecho es todavía en gran medida el estudio de la historia.”
9. “Certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.”
Conclusion
Great people make history and if you want to be successful always keep your goals clear and follow great people. Read and learn from their experiences and sayings.
Holmes retired at the age of 90. Imagine the things he would have gone throw and the amount of knowledge gained with the experience of all these years.
These 60 quotes is just a peak of his knowledge, but they will change your perspective for sure.
