One of the Most Notable Jurists in History
He bravely fought in the Civil War and for justice
Born in New England he was encouraged from a young age to succeed by his famous father and succeed he did! At the outbreak of the Civil War, he left Harvard to join the Union Army. Having fought in many battles he was wounded in battle three times. After the third time he was wounded he was sent home to Boston and promoted to brevet colonel for his gallant and meritorious conduct.
At 39 years of age he published a book titled The Common Law, and he was widely regarded as the greatest author on the subject. President Theodore Roosevelt admired his willingness to challenge the rich and powerful and appointed him to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1902.
Born Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in 1841 in Boston, Massachusetts, he served on the U.S. Supreme Court for 30 years, dying in 1935 at the age of 93. He became one of the greatest judges and continues to be one of the most cited Supreme Court justices in history. He was honored as one of the most influential American common law judges during his lifetime by both Britain and the United States.
You can find most of his works, as well as his father’s works on Project Gutenberg, and on many websites. As well, many books are available about Holmes and the life he led. Let’s take a look at this remarkable jurist through the lens of some of his own words.
Tax and Government
“Any tax is a discouragement and therefore a regulation so far as it goes.”
“Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.”
“I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.”
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“We have to choose, and for my part I think it a less evil that some criminals should escape than that the government should play an ignoble part.”
“The only prize much cared for by the powerful is power.”
“Men must turn square corners when they deal with the Government.”
Law
“The first requirement of a sound body of law is, that it should correspond with the actual feelings and demands of the community, whether right or wrong.”
“The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.”
“The language of judicial decision is mainly the language of logic. And the logical method and form flatter that longing for certainty and for repose which is in every human mind. But certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.”
Truth and Facts
“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.”
“The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts, but learning how to make facts live.”
“Our test of truth is a reference to either a present or imagined future majority in favour of our view.”
Certitude
“Certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.”
“Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.”
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“Certitude leads to violence. This is a proposition that has an easy application and a difficult one. The easy application is to ideoologues, dogmatists, and bullies — people who think that their rigtness justifies them in imposing on anyone who does not happen to suscribe to their particular ideology, dogma or notion of turf. If the conviction of rightness is powerful enough, resistance to it will be met, sooner or later by force. There are people like this in every sphere of life, and it is natural to feel that the world would be a better place without them!”
Knowledge
“Every year, if not every day, we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge.”
“The young man knows the rules but the old man knows the exceptions.”
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“I detest a man who knows that he knows.”
“To know is not less than to feel.”
“Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.”
Passion and Action
“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.”
“I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy.”
“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.”
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“Get down, you fool!” (Said to Abraham Lincoln when he came under fire during the Civil War.)
“The man of action has the present, but the thinker controls the future.”
Young and Old
“There is no time like the old time, when you and I were young!”
“Longevity is having a chronic disease — and taking care of it.”
“The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.”
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“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.”
“Old age is like an opium dream. Nothing seems real except the unreal.”
Belief
“We believed that it was most desirable that the North should win, we believed in the principle that the Union is indissoluable, we, or many of us at least, also believed that the conflict was inevitable, and that slavery had lasted long enough. But we equally believed that those who stood against us held just as sacred conviction that were the opposite of ours, and we respected them as every men with a heart must respect those who give all for their belief.”
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“I believe that there are no innate, intrinsic differences among a human being , a baboon or a grain of sand.”
“Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief and if believed it is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at birth. Eloquence may set fire to reason.”
“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.”
Not God
“Young man, the secret of my success is that at an early age I discovered that I was not God.”
“The greatest act of faith is when a man understands he is not God.”
“I have always sought to guide the future-but it is very lonely sometimes trying to play God.”
Thought
“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 very minute a thought is threatened with publicity it seems to shrink towards mediocrity.”
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“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.”
“To think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists.”
“The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. “
Life
“Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.”
“If you don’t know what you want, you will probably never get it.”
“Life, not the parson, teaches conduct.”
Wit and Humor
“A goose flies by a chart the Royal Geographic Society could not improve.”
“The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract.”
“Knowledge and timber shouldn’t be much used till they are seasoned.”
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“Man has will, but woman has her way.”
“There are three natural anaesthetics: Sleep, fainting, and death.”
“A man is usually more careful of his money than of his principles.”
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“Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.”
“Men, like peaches and pears, grow sweet a little while before they begin to decay.”
Science
“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.”
“Knowledge-it excites prejudices to call it science-is advancing as irresistibly, as majestically, as remorselessly as the ocean moves in upon the shore.”
“Science is the topography of ignorance. From a few elevated points we triangulate vast spaces, inclosing infinite unknown details. We cast the lead, and draw up a little sand from abysses we may never reach with our dredges.”
Leadership
“The noblest service comes from nameless hands; and the best servant does his work unseen.”
“Between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force. “
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“Carve every word before you let it fall.”
“Most people are willing to take the Sermon on the Mount as a flag to sail under, but few will use it as a rudder by which to steer.”
Success and Inspiration
“Every man has a right to do what he wills, provided he interferes not with a like right on the part of his neighbors.”
“Every calling is great when greatly pursued.”
“The mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort. “
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“Where we stand is not as important as the direction in which we are moving.”
“Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else.”
Wisdom
“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.”
“A child’s education should begin at least 100 years before he was born.”
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“To have doubted one’s own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.”
“A mind that is stretched by new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”
“The mark of a civilized man is his willingness to re-examine his most cherished beliefs.”
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“Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most important thing in the end.”
“Beware how you take away hope from another human being.”
“Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.”
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“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.”
“We are very quiet there, but it is the quiet of a storm center.”
“We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.”
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“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. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
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“Don’t flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.”
“Imitation is a necessity of human nature.”
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“The petitioner may have a constitutional right to talk politics, but he has no constitutional right to be a policeman.”
“History has to be rewritten because history is the selection of those threads of causes or antecedents that we are interested in.”
I leave you with these final quotes from Holmes. A challenge to continue learning and growing:
“Every now and then a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.”
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
And a challenge to know where you are going:
“The great thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are going.”
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
If you desire to make your life count you cannot go wrong by continuing to learn and grow while seeing where you are going. May you have much success in all you do!
Bill Abbate Leadership Writer and Editor in ILLUMINATION.
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