There are many things which we can afford to forget which it is yet well to learn.
Between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote suggests that when two opposing groups have conflicting visions for the world, the only way to resolve their differences may be through coercive means.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. reflects on the inevitable clash between groups with fundamentally different aspirations for society. He implies that when two factions cannot reconcile their opposing desires to shape the world in different ways, peaceful negotiation may fail, leading to the only solution being the use of force. This encourages a contemplation on the nature of societal conflict and the extremes that may arise when divergent ideologies collide.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a debate about the justification of war in international relations.
More from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
All quotes βOn the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirms the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.
If you don't know what you want, you will probably never get it.
Why should you row a boat race? Why endure the long months of pain in preparation for a fierce half hour that will leave you all but dead? Does anyone ask the question? Is there anyone who would not go through all the costs, and more, for the moment when anguish breaks into triumph or even for the glory of having nobly lost? Is life less than a boat race? If a man will give the blood in his body to win the one, will he spend all the might of his soul to prevail in the other?
The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts, but learning how to make facts live.
Beware how you take away hope from another human being.
Similar quotes
This regionalization is in keeping with the Tri-Lateral Plan which calls for a gradual convergence of East and West, ultimately leading toward the goal of one world government. National sovereignty is no longer a viable concept.
People who think you could wave a magic wand and the legacy of the past will be over are blind.
Keats mourned that the rainbow, which as a boy had been for him a magic thing, had lost its glory because the physicists had found it resulted merely from the refraction of the sunlight by the raindrops. Yet knowledge of its causation could not spoil the rainbow for me. I am sure that it is not given to man to be omniscient. There will always be something left to know, something to excite the imagination of the poet and those attuned to the great world in which they live (p. 64)
All abstract sciences are nothing but the study of relations between signs.
The self-styled practical man of affairs who pooh-poohs philosophy as a lot of windy notions is himself a pragmatist or a positivist, and a bad one at that, since he has given no thought to his position.
I am neither male nor female, nor am I sexless. I am the Peaceful One, whose form is self-effulgent, powerful radiance.