Quotes · Skopia

16 quotes

Group bySubject Speaker Era Genre

Person·Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.✕clear

Legal writing8 quotes

Taxes are what we pay for civilized society. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. · 1927 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. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. · 1929 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. · 1923 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. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. · 1918 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. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. · 1919 The government ought not to use evidence obtained and only obtainable, by a criminal act...for my part I think it a less evil that some criminals could escape than that, the Government should play an ignoble part. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. · 1928 All 8 quotes →

Dissenting opinion1 quote

General propositions do not decide concrete cases. The decision will depend on a judgement or intuition more subtle than any articulate major premise. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. · 1905