Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

1860s

• Get down, you fool!
  • Assertion famously directed at then-President Abraham Lincoln when he came under enemy fire at Fort Stevens during the American Civil War, as quoted in Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (2005) by Doris Kearns Goodwin, p. 643.

1870s

• But as precedents survive like the clavicle in the cat, long after the use they once served is at an end, and the reason for them has been forgotten, the result of following them must often be failure and confusion from the merely logical point of view.
  • "Common Carriers and the Common Law," 13 Am. Law Rev. 608, 630 (1879).

• It is the merit of the common law that it decides the case first and determines the principle afterwards.
  • "Codes, and the Arrangement of the Law," 5 Am. L. Rev. 1, 1 (1870).

1880s

• The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience... The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics.
  • The Common Law (1881), p. 1.

• The degree of civilization which a people has reached, no doubt, is marked by their anxiety to do as they would be done by.
  • Ibid., p. 44.

• State interference is an evil, where it cannot be shown to be a good.
  • Ibid., p. 88-96.

1890s

• As for us, our days of combat are over. Our swords are rust. Our guns will thunder no more. The vultures that once wheeled over our heads must be buried with their prey. Whatever of glory must be won in the council or the closet, never again in the field. I do not repine. We have shared the incommunicable experience of war; we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top.
  • "The Soldier's Faith" Memorial Day address at Harvard University (30 May 1895).

• The law, so far as it depends on learning, is indeed, as it has been called, the government of the living by the dead. To a very considerable extent no doubt it is inevitable that the living should be so governed. The past gives us our vocabulary and fixes the limits of our imagination; we cannot get away from it. There is, too, a peculiar logical pleasure in making manifest the continuity between what we are doing and what has been done before. But the present has a right to govern itself so far as it can; and it ought always to be remembered that historic continuity with the past is not a duty, it is only a necessity.
  • "Learning and Science", speech at a dinner of the Harvard Law School Association in honor of Professor C. C. Langdell (June 25, 1895); reported in Speeches by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1896). p. 67-68.

• I always say you can get your tragedy of any desired length in England, from thirty seconds to a lifetime. I had one adorable one of twenty-nine minutes by the watch. At the end of that time I started for my train. Woman I'd had a glimpse of in London — walk. She sat on a style, I below her, gazing into her eyes — then, "remember this lane," "while memory holds its seat, etc." "Adieu." And I still do and ever shall remember her, and I rather think she does me a little bit. What imbecilities for an old fellow to be talking. But if one knows his place and makes way for younger men when he isn't sure, it is better perhaps not quite to abandon interest in the sports of life.
  • Letter to Sir Frederick Pollock (23 August 1895); reported in Holmes-Pollock Letters: The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Sir Frederick Pollock (1961) edited by Mark De Wolfe Howe, Vol. 1, p. 60; also reported in The Mind and Faith of Justice Holmes: His Speeches, Essays, Letters, and Judicial Opinions (1954), p. 437.

• Free competition is worth more to society than it costs.
  • Vegelahn v. Guntner, 167 Mass. 92, 44 N.E. 1077, 1080 (1896) (Supreme Court of Massachusetts, Holmes dissenting).

• One of the eternal conflicts out of which life is made up is that between the effort of every man to get the most he can for his services, and that of society, disguised under the name of capital, to get his services for the least possible return.
  • Ibid.

• 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.
  • "The Path of the Law," Address to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts at the dedication of the new hall of the Boston University School of Law (8 January 1897), published in Harvard Law Review, Vol. 10 (25 March 1897).

• The aim of the law is not to punish sins, but is to prevent certain external results.
  • Commonwealth v. Kennedy, 170 Mass. 18, 20 (1897) (opinion of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts).

1900s

• 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.
  • in a letter to Sir Frederick Pollock dated October 14, 1902
  • collected in "Holmes-Pollock Letters : The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Sir Frederick Pollock, 1874-1932" (2nd ed., 1961), p. 109.
  • Often quoted as "I wouldn't give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity; I would give my right arm for the simplicity on the far side of complexity" and attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr..

• One has to try to strike the jugular and let the rest go.
  • Speech on the death of Walbridge Abner Field, Chief Justice of Massachusetts (25 November 1899), reported in Speeches by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1900), p. 77.

• 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.
  • Address at the dedication of the Northwestern University Law School Building, Chicago, Illinois (20 October 1902); republished in Holmes' Collected Legal Papers (1937), p. 272.

• Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.
  • Reportedly first said by Holmes in a speech in 1904, alternately phrased as "Taxes are what we pay for civilized society, including the chance to insure", Compania General De Tabacos De Filipinas v. Collector of Internal Revenue, 275 U.S. 87, 100, dissenting; opinion (21 November 1927). The first variation is quoted by the IRS above the entrance to their headquarters at 1111 Constitution Avenue.

• Great cases like hard cases make bad law. For great cases are called great, not by reason of their importance in shaping the law of the future, but because of some accident of immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings and distorts the judgement.
  • Northern Securities Co. v. United States, 193 U.S. 197, 400-401 (1904).

• Constitutions are intended to preserve practical and substantial rights, not to maintain theories.
  • Davis v. Mills, 194 U.S. 451, 457 (1904).

• I can't help preferring champagne to ditch water — I doubt if the universe does.
  • Letter to William James (24 March 1907); this was misquoted as "I happen to prefer champagne to ditchwater, but there is no reason to suppose that the cosmos does" in "Our Mission Statement" by William F. Buckley, Jr., in National Review (19 November 1955).

• The great act of faith is when a man decides that he is not God.
  • Letter to William James (24 March 1907).

• Philosophy may have gained by the attempts in recent years to look through the fiction to the fact and to generalize corporations, partnerships, and other groups into a single conception. But to generalize is to omit, and, in this instance, to omit one characteristic of the complete corporation, as called into being under modern statutes, that is most important in business and law.
  • Donnell v. Herring-Hall-Marvin Safe Co., 208 U.S. 267, 273 (1908).

• The major premise of the conclusion expressed in a statute, the change of policy that induces the enactment, may not be set out in terms, but it is not an adequate discharge of duty for courts to say: We see what you are driving at, but you have not said it, and therefore we shall go on as before.
  • Johnson v. United States, 163 F. 30 (1st Cir. 1908) (Justice Holmes sitting by designation as a judge of the First Circuit).

• Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.
  • "Early Forms of Liability," Lecture I from The Common Law. (1909).

1910s

• Now and then, an extraordinary case may turn up, but constitutional law, like other mortal contrivances, has to take some chances, and in the great majority of instances, no doubt, justice will be done.
  • Blinn v. Nelson, 222 U.S. 1, 7 (1911).

• Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.
  • Address to the Harvard Alumni Association to the Class of '61, in Speeches (1913), p. 96.

• Life is a roar of bargain and battle, but in the very heart of it there rises a mystic spiritual tone that gives meaning to the whole. It transmutes the dull details into romance. It reminds us that our only but wholly adequate significance is as parts of the unimaginable whole. It suggests that even while living we are living to ends outside ourselves
  • Address to the Harvard Alumni Association to the Class of '61, in Speeches (1913), p. 96.

• Life is action, the use of one's powers. As to use them to their height is our joy and duty, so it is the one end that justifies itself.
  • Speech to the Bar Association of Boston, in Speeches (1913), p. 85.

• 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.
  • Speech to the Bar Association of Boston, in Speeches (1913), p. 85.

• 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.
  • Speech to the Bar Association of Boston, in Speeches (1913), p. 86.

• It is urged in the first place that contempts cannot be crimes, because, although punishable by imprisonment, and therefore, if crimes, infamous, they are not within the protection of the Constitution and the Amendments giving a right to trial by jury, etc., to persons charged with such crimes. But the provisions of the Constitution are not mathematical formulas having their essence in their form; they are organic, living institutions transplanted from English soil. Their significance is vital, not formal; it is to be gathered not simply by taking the words and a dictionary, but by considering their origin and the line of their growth.
  • Gompers v. United States, 233 U.S. 604, 610 (1914).

• Whatever disagreement there may be as to the scope of the phrase "due process of law" there can be no doubt that it embraces the fundamental conception of a fair trial, with opportunity to be heard.
  • Frank v. Magnum, 237 U.S. 309, 347 (1915).

• The common law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky, but the articulate voice of some sovereign or quasi sovereign that can be identified; although some decisions with which I have disagreed seem to me to have forgotten the fact.
  • Southern Pacific Company v. Jensen 244 U.S. 205, 222 (1917) (Holmes, J., dissenting; opinion published (21 May 1917).

• 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.
  • Towne vs. Eisner, 245 U.S. 418, 425 (7 January 1918).

• The character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done.
  • Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47, 52 (3 March 1919).

• The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.
  • Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47, 52 (3 March 1919).

• The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree. When a nation is at war many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.
  • Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47, 52 (3 March 1919).

Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616 (1919)

Dissenting opinion (10 November 1919).

• That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.
  • 250 U.S. 616; 630.

• It is only the present danger of immediate evil or an intent to bring it about that warrants Congress in setting a limit to the expression of opinion where private rights are not concerned.
  • 250 U.S. at 628.

• To allow opposition by speech seems to indicate that you think the speech impotent, as when a man says that he has squared the circle, or that you do not care whole-heartedly for the result, or that you doubt either your power or your premises. But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas —that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution.
  • 250 U.S. at 630.

• 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.
  • 250 U.S. at 630.

• Only the emergency that makes it immediately dangerous to leave the correction of evil counsels to time warrants making any exception to the sweeping command, "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech."
  • 250 U.S. at 630-31.

1920s

• I always say, as you know, that if my fellow citizens want to go to Hell I will help them. It's my job.
  • Letter to Harold Laski (4 March 1920); reported in Holmes-Laski Letters (1953) by Mark DeWolfe Howe, vol. 1, p. 249.

• Men must turn square corners when they deal with the Government.
  • Rock Island C.R.R. v. United States, 254 U.S. 141, 143 (22 November 1920).

• Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife.
  • Brown v. United States, 256 U.S. 335, 343 (16 May 1921).

• A page of history is worth a volume of logic.
  • New York Trust Co. v. Eisner, 256 U.S. 345, 349 (1921).

• If a thing has been practised for two hundred years by common consent, it will need a strong case for the Fourteenth Amendment to affect it.
  • Jackman v. Rosenbaum Co., 260 U.S. 22, 31 (1922).

• 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.
  • Pennsylvania Coal Company v. H. J. Mahon, 260 U.S. 415, 415 (1922).

• I confess that I do not understand the principle on which the power to fix a minimum for the wages of women can be denied by those who admit the power to fix a maximum for their hours of work. I fully assent to the proposition that here as elsewhere the distinctions of the law are distinctions of degree, but I perceive no difference in the kind or degree of interference with liberty, the only matter with which we have any concern, between the one case and the other. The bargain is equally affected whichever half you regulate…. It will need more than the Nineteenth Amendment to convince me that there are no differences between men and women, or that legislation cannot take those differences into account.
  • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., dissenting, Adkins, et al., Constituting the Minimum Wage Board of the District of Columbia, v. Children's Hospital of the District of Columbia; Same v. Lyons, 261 U.S. 569–70 (1923).

• If I were dying, my last words would be, Have faith and pursue the unknown end.
  • Letter to John Ching Hsiung Wu (1924), published in Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: His Book Notices and Uncollected Letters and Papers (1936) by Harry Clair Shriver, p. 175.

• Eloquence may set fire to reason.
  • Gitlow v. People of New York, 268 U.S. 652 (1925) (dissenting).

• If in the long run the beliefs expressed in proletarian dictatorship are destined to be accepted by the dominant forces of the community, the only meaning of free speech is that they should be given their chance and have their way.
  • Gitlow v. People of New York, 268 U.S. 652 (1925) (dissenting).

• We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. 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....Three generations of imbeciles are enough.
  • Writing for the Court, Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200, 207 (1927) (endorsing Virginia's eugenics program).

• The power to tax is not the power to destroy while this Court sits.
  • Panhandle Oil Co. v. Mississippi ex rel. Knox, 277 U.S. 233 (1928).

• Courts are apt to err by sticking too closely to the words of a law where those words import a policy that goes beyond them.
  • Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 469 (1928) (Holmes, J., dissenting).

• Some of her answers might excite popular prejudice, but 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.
  • United States v. Schwimmer, 279 U.S. 644 (1929) (Holmes, J., dissenting).

1930s

• The elaborate argument against the constitutionality of the Act if interpreted as we read it, in accordance with its obvious meaning does not need an elaborate answer.
  • Writing for the Court, United States v. Wurzbach, 280 U.S. 396, 399 (1930).

• Young man, the secret of my success is that at an early age I discovered that I was not God.
  • On his 90th birthday to a journalist (8 March 1931), as quoted in Information 2000: Library and Information Services for the 21st Century, Vol. 1991, Part 2 (1992) by the U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science, p. 272.

• There are some men, who as they approach 70, read the Bible and prepare to die. Others prepare themselves to live to 90. It has been my observation that if a man prepares to live to 90, but dies at 70, no harm is done. If however, a man prepares to live to 70 but ends up dying at 90, then his last 20 years will be hell.^{[citation needed]}

• A river is more than an amenity, it is a treasure. It offers a necessity of life that must be rationed among those who have power over it.
  • Writing for the Court, New Jersey v. New York, et al., 283 U.S. 336, 342 (1931).

• The interpretation of constitutional principles must not be too literal. We must remember that the machinery of government would not work if it were not allowed a little play in its joints.
  • Writing for the Court, Bain Peanut Co. v. Pinson, 282 U.S. 499, 501 (1931).

• I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy — I don't disparage envy but I don't accept it as legitimately my master.
  • Holmes-Laski Letters : The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Harold J. Laski, 1916 - 1935 (1953), Vol. 2, p. 942.

Undated

• A good catchword can obscure analysis for fifty years.
  • Quoted by Wendell Willkie during an America's Town Meeting of the Air broadcast, at The Town Hall in New York City, (6 January 1938).

Attributions

• Lawyers spend their professional careers shoveling smoke.
  • Attributed in Watergate and the White House, Volumes 1-2 (1973) by Edward W. Knappman, p. 100; this has also become paraphrased as "Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke".

• Gentlemen, to the lady without whom I should never have survived for eighty, nor sixty, nor yet thirty years. Her smile has been my lyric, her understanding, the rhythm of the stanza. She has been the spring wherefrom I have drawn the power to write the words. She is the poem of my life.
  • Attribution reported in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989), which states that this is not verified in works about him nor in Magnificent Yankee, the film about him. Holmes expressed a similar sentiment in a letter to Sir Frederick Pollock (May 24, 1929): "For sixty years she made life poetry for me". Mark De Wolfe Howe, ed., Holmes-Pollock Letters (1941), vol. 2, p. 243.

• A second class mind, but a first class temperament.
  • A summation of his opinion of Theodore Roosevelt, indicated in various letters, but not recorded in so succinct a form; often incorrectly stated as his opinion of Franklin D. Roosevelt, as indicated in the p. xiv–xv Introduction to The Essential Holmes (1992), edited by Richard A. Posner.