The Philosopher
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The face
The background
- Nationality:
- American
- Schools:
- Legal realism, Legal positivism
- Period:
- 19th-20th century
The synopsis
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (March 8, 1841 – March 6, 1935) was an American jurist and Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1902 to 1932. Renowned for his long tenure and insightful, often pithy, opinions, Holmes significantly influenced American constitutional law, particularly in the areas of civil liberties and economic regulation. He is celebrated for his intellectual rigor, his deference to legislative decisions, and his famous maxim, "The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience." Before his Supreme Court appointment, Holmes served with distinction in the Union Army during the Civil War, where he was wounded three times. He also held positions as an associate justice and chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Holmes was a key figure in the development of legal realism, challenging legal formalism and advocating for a pragmatic approach to law that considered societal needs and evolving circumstances. His jurisprudence significantly shaped subsequent legal thought in the United States.
The works
The Common Law
The quotes
Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.
Beware how you take away hope from another human being.
The greatest act of faith is when a man understands he is not God.
Every calling is great when greatly pursued.
The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.
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.
I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country.
The rules of evidence in the main are based on experience, logic, and common sense, less hampered by history than some parts of the substantive law.
A man is usually more careful of his money than of his principles.
Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.
The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts, but learning how to make facts live.
The only prize much cared for by the powerful is power.
On 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.
I despise making the most of one's time. Half of the pleasures of life consist of the opportunities one has neglected.
The language of judicial decision is mainly the language of logic. And the logical method and form flatter that longing for certainty and for repose which is in every human mind. But certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.
The great act of faith is when a man decides he is not God.
It is very lonely sometimes, trying to play God.
Young man, the secret of my success is that at early age I discovered that I was not God.
Men must turn square corners when they deal with the Government.
Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.
If I were dying, my last words would be: Have faith and pursue the unknown end.
It seems to me that at this time we need education in the obvious more than investigation of the obscure.
Between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force.
Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it.
Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.
Every idea is an incitement... eloquence may set fire to reason.
Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.
A new and valid idea is worth more than a regiment and fewer men can furnish the former than command the latter.
To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.
The mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort.
You make me chuckle when you say that you are no longer young, that you have turned twenty-four. A man is or may be young to after sixty, and not old before eighty.
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.
When in doubt, do it.
People talk fundamentals and superlatives and then make some changes of detail.
The rule of joy and the law of duty seem to me all one.
A new untruth is better than an old truth.
To be civilized is to be potentially master of all possible ideas, and that means that one has got beyond being shocked, although one preserves one's own moral aesthetic preferences.
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.
Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our fathers have done them or our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a larger part than what we suspect of what we think.
Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most important thing in the end.