Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

“The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.”

“Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”

“The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.”

“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.”

“A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”

“The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins.”

“Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.”

“The great thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving.”

“The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour upon it, the more it will contract.”

“Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

“Every calling is great when greatly pursued.”

“The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race.”

“I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.”

“To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.”

“General propositions do not decide concrete cases.”

“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.”

“The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts, but learning how to make facts live.”

“Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.”