Quotes from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Men are idolaters, and want something to look at and kiss and hug, or throw themselves down before; they always did, they always will; and if you don't make it of wood, you must make it of words.

Lord, bid war's trumpet cease; Fold the whole earth in peace.

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.

There was never an idea started that woke up men out of their stupid indifference but its originator was spoken of as a crank.

Liberty is often a heavy burden on a man. It involves the necessity for perpetual choice which is the kind of labor men have always dreaded.

I think it not improbable that man, like the grub that prepares a chamber for the winged thing it never has seen but is to be - that man may have cosmic destinies that he does not understand.

What a new face courage puts on everything. - Ralph Waldo Emerson To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.

The mark of a civilized man is his willingness to re-examine his most cherished beliefs.

A man's opinions are generally of much more value than his arguments.

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.

Young men know the rules, but old men know the exceptions.

From forty to fifty a man must move upward, or the natural falling off in the vigor of life will carry him rapidly downward.

A new and valid idea is worth more than a regiment and fewer men can furnish the former than command the latter.

Our morality seems to me 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.

The mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort.

While we've youth in our hearts, we can never grow old.

If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought, not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.

The noblest service comes from nameless hands; and the best servant does his work unseen.

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.

What I wouldn't give to be seventy again!

Leisure only means a chance to do other jobs that demand attention.

Carve every word before you let it fall.

Most people have died before they expire; died to all earthly longings, so that the last breath is only, as it were, the locking of the door of the already deserted mansion.

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.