Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Judge

1841-03-08

Books by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

The common law
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Holmes-Laski letters

the correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Harold J. Laski, 1916-1935
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The United States in Literature [with three long stories] -- Seventh Edition
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Quotes by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Young man, the secret of my success is that an early age I discovered that I was not God.
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Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.
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Men must turn square corners when they deal with the Government.
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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.
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Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.
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You make me chuckle when you say that you are no longer young, that you have turned twenty-four. A man is or may be young to after sixty, and not old before eighty.
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The greatest act of faith is when a man understands he is not God.
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A new and valid idea is worth more than a regiment and fewer men can furnish the former than command the latter.
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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.
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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.
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When in doubt, do it.
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Between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force.
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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.
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Young man, the secret of my success is that at early age I discovered that I was not God.
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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.
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Modesty and reverence are no less virtues of freemen than the democratic feeling which will submit neither to arrogance nor to servility.
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A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time.
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Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.
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The mind of the bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour upon it, the more it will contract.
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The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour upon it, the more it will contract.
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