Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Quotes

Share the passion and action of your time at peril of being judged not to have lived.

I have never heard anyone profess indifference to a boat race. Why should you row a boat race? Why endure long months of pain in preparation of a fierce half hour, or even six minutes, that will leave you all but dead? Does anyone ask the question? Is there anyone who would not go through all its 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 all the blood in his body to win the one, will he not spend all the might of his soul to prevail in the other?

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

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!

We are very quiet there, but it is the quiet of a storm centre. .

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.

A goose flies by a chart the Royal Geographic Society could not improve.

I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy.