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The power to tax is not the power to destroy while this Court sits.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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A question like the present should be disposed of without undue delay. But a State cannot be expected to move with the celerity of a private business man; it is enough if it proceeds, in the language of the English Chancery, with all deliberate speed.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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A river is more than an amenity, it is a treasure.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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The general rule, at least, is that while property may be regulated to a certain extent, if regulation goes too far it will be recognized as a taking.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Speak not too well of one who scarce will knowHimself transfigured in its roseate glow;Say kindly of him what is, chiefly, true,Remembering always he belongs to you;Deal with him as a truant, if you will,But claim him, keep him, call him brother still!
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Every living sentence which shows a mind at work for itself is to be welcomed. It is not the first use but the tiresome repetition of inadequate catch words which I am observingphrases which originally were contributions, but which, by their very felicity, delay further analysis for fifty years. That comes from the same source as dislike of noveltyintellectual indolence or weaknessa slackening in the eternal pursuit of the more exact.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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The riders in a race do not stop short when they reach the goal. There is a little finishing canter before coming to a standstill. There is time to hear the kind voice of friends and to say to ones self: The work is done. But just as one says that, the answer comes: The race is over, but the work never is done while the power to work remains. The canter that brings you to a standstill need not be only coming to rest. It cannot be while you still live. For to live is to function. That is all there is in living.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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O Damsel Dorothy! Dorothy Q. !Strange is the gift that I owe to you;Such a gift as never a kingSave to daughter or son might bring,All my tenure of heart and hand,All my title to house and land;Mother and sister and child and wifeAnd joy and sorrow and death and life!
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Life is a romantic business. It is painting a picture, not doing a sumbut you have to make the romance, and it will come to the question how much fire you have in your belly.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Great constitutional provisions must be administered with caution. Some play must be allowed for the joints of the machine, and it must be remembered that legislatures are ultimate guardians of the liberties and welfare of the people in quite as great a degree as the courts.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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It cannot be helped, it is as it should be, that the law is behind the times.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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It is revolting to have no better reason for a rule of law than that so it was laid down in the time of Henry IV.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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When twenty years ago a vague terror went over the earth and the word socialism began to be heard, I thought and still think that fear was translated into doctrines that had no proper place in the Constitution or the common law. Judges are apt to be naif, simple-minded men, and they need something of Mephistopheles. We too need education in the obviousto learn to transcend our own convictions and to leave room for much that we hold dear to be done away with short of revolution by the orderly change of law.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Nature has but one judgment on wrong conductif you can call that a judgment which seemingly has no reference to conduct as suchthe judgment of death.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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I do not think the United States would come to an end if we lost our power to declare an Act of Congress void. I do think the Union would be imperiled if we could not make that declaration as to the laws of the several States.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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It is now the moment when by common consent we pause to become conscious of our national life and to rejoice in it, to recall what our country has done for each of us, and to ask ourselves what we can do for our country in return.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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But the character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done. The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. It does not even protect a man from an injunction against uttering words that may have all the effect of force. The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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I always say, as you know, that if my fellow citizens want to go to Hell I will help them. Its my job.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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I confess that I do not understand the principle on which the power to fix a minimum for the wages of women can be denied by those who admit the power to fix a maximum for their hours of work. I fully assent to the proposition that here as elsewhere the distinctions of the law are distinctions of degree, but I perceive no difference in the kind or degree of interference with liberty, the only matter with which we have any concern, between the one case and the other. The bargain is equally affected whichever half you regulate. It will need more than the Nineteenth Amendment to convince me that there are no differences between men and women, or that legislation cannot take those differences into account.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Gentlemen, to the lady without whom I should never have survived for eighty, nor sixty, nor yet thirty years. Her smile has been my lyric, her understanding, the rhythm of the stanza. She has been the spring wherefrom I have drawn the power to write the words. She is the poem of my life.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideasthat the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Ability
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As life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time, at the peril of being not to have lived.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Action(s)
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I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it, but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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To reach a port we must sail, sometimes with the wind, and sometimes against it. But we must not drift or lie at anchor.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Advertising
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Several years before birth, advertise for a couple of parents belonging to long-lived families.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Books by and about Oliver Wendell Holmes