Quotes from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

To an imagination of any scope the most far reaching form of power is not money, it is the command of ideas

Knowledge-it excites prejudices to call it science-is advancing as irresistibly, as majestically, as remorselessly as the ocean moves in upon the shore.

Longevity is having a chronic disease - and taking care of it.

Certitude is not the test of certainty.

The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.

To be civilized is to be potentially master of all possible ideas, and that means that one has got beyond being shocked, although one preserves one's own moral aesthetic preferences.

The great act of faith is when a man decides he is not God.

We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.

Science ... in other words, knowledge-is not the enemy of religion; for, if so, then religion would mean ignorance. But it is often the antagonist of school-divinity.

The character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done.

A man is usually more careful of his money than of his principles.

To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.

The only prize much cared for by the powerful is power.

Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.

Society is always trying in some way to grind us down to a single flat surface.

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.

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.

I despise making the most of one's time. Half of the pleasures of life consist of the opportunities one has neglected.

As for the excellent little wretches who grow up in what they are taught, with never a scruple or a query, ... they signify nothing in the intellectual life of the race.

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.

Success. Is not the position where you are standing, but which direction you are going.

If you can eat sawdust without butter, you can be a success in the law.

Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.

The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race.