A new and valid idea is worth more than a regiment and fewer men can furnish the former than command the latter. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
People talk fundamentals and superlatives and then make some changes of detail. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
It is now the moment when by common consent we pause to become conscious of our national life and to rejoice in it, to recall what our country has done for each of us, and to ask ourselves what we can do for our country in return. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
We have shared the incommunicable experience of war, we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top. In our youth our hearts were touched with fire. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
A child's education should begin at least 100 years before he was born. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Academic life is but half life it is a withdrawal from the fight to utter smart things that cost you nothing except the thinking them from a cloister. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
I despise making the most of one's time. Half of the pleasures of life consist of the opportunities one has neglected. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at the touch, nay, you may kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanging, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in colour and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Every year, if not every day, we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Man's mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
To live is to function. That is all there is in living. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Every event that a man would master must be mounted on the run, and no man ever caught the reins of a thought except as it galloped past him. - 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.
A moment's insight is sometimes worth a lifetime's experience. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
A man who called everyone a damn fool is like a man who damns the weather. He only shows that he is not adapted to his environment, not that the environment is wrong. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving -- we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it -- but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
A goose flies by a chart the Royal Geographic Society could not improve. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep to the real and the true. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
A child's education should begin at least one hundred years before he is born. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
A man's mind, stretched by new ideas, may never reurn to it's original dimensions. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanging, 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. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
But, nevertheless, the generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its experience. 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. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
To know is not less than to feel. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The great act of faith is when a man decides he is not God. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The great thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are moving. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The greatest thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in which direction we are moving. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of superstitious fears which were implanted in his imagination, no matter how utterly his reason may reject them. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas [and] the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
A page of history is worth a pound of logic. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The great thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are going. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
It is the province of knowledge to speak And it is the privilege of wisdom to listen. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
To be 70 years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be 40 years old. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
If a man hasn't got plenty of good common sense, the more science he has the worse for his patient. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Nothing is so frequent as to mistake an ordinary human gift for a special and extraordinary endowment. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimension. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.