Quotes from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Society is always trying in some way to grind us down to a single flat surface.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
People talk fundamentals and superlatives and then make some changes of detail.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
[The Constitution] is an experiment as all life is an experiment.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
If I were dying, my last words would be: Have faith and pursue the unknown end.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Go on, fair Science; soon to thee Shall Nature yield her idle boast; Her vulgar lingers formed a tree, But thou hast trained it to a post.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Reason means truth and those who are not governed by it take the chance that someday the sunken fact will rip the bottom out of their boat.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Our test of truth is a reference to either a present or imagined future majority in favour of our view.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Don't be consistent but be simply true.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.