Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Leisure only means a chance to do other jobs that demand attention.

[The Constitution] is an experiment as all life is an experiment.

To us who remain behind is left this day of memories. Every year--in the full tide of spring, at the height of the symphony of flowers and love and life--there comes a pause, and through the silence we hear the lonely pipe of death.

The rule of joy and the law of duty seem to me all one.

A new untruth is better than an old truth.

Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.

Every idea is an incitement... eloquence may set fire to reason.

The great act of faith is when a man decides he is not God.

For my part I think it is a less evil that some criminals should escape, than that the government should play an ignoble part.

Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.

Reason means truth and those who are not governed by it_x000D_ take the chance that someday the sunken fact will rip_x000D_ the bottom out of their boat.

No generalization is wholly true—not even this one.

In my opinion, economists and sociologists are the people to whom we ought to turn more than we do for instruction in the grounds and foundations of all rational decisions.

From forty to fifty a man must move upward, or the natural falling off in the vigor of life will carry him rapidly downward.

The riders in a race do not stop when they reach the goal. There is a little finishing canter before coming to a standstill. There is time to hear the kind voices of friends and say to oneself, The work is done.

I have always sought to guide the future-but it is very lonely sometimes trying to play God.

I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy - I don't disparage envy, but I don't accept it as legitimately my master.

I despise making the most of one's time. Half of the pleasures of life consist of the opportunities one has neglected.

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.

Between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force.