"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 the country in return."

"State interference is an evil, where it cannot be shown to be a good."

"The degree of civilization which a people has reached, no doubt, is marked by their anxiety to do as they would be done by."

"The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience... The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics."

"But as precedents survive like the clavicle in the cat, long after the use they once served is at an end, and the reason for them has been forgotten, the result of following them must often be failure and confusion from the merely logical point of view."

"It is the merit of the common law that it decides the case first and determines the principle afterwards."

"An aristocrat in morals as in mind."

"America is not broke. The very wealthy and hugely profitable corporations just aren't paying the taxes that, in the words of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes more than a century ago, "are the price we pay for a civilized society.""

"Holmes was exacting in construing a statute and latitudinarian in construing powers under the Constitution. He often said that there was nothing in the Constitution that prevented the country from going to hell if it chose to. But once a statute was clearly constitutional and it became a matter of construing it, Holmes put on his most scrupulous spectacles."

"While a judge of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, when he found the long-winded speeches of the lawyers especially trying, he advised them gravely to take a course of reading risque books, that they might learn to say things by innuendo."

"Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions."

"The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions."

"Keep government poor and remain free."

"Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man's nose begins."

"Old age is always fifteen years older than I am."

"A man's mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions."

"There is no friend like an old friend who has shared our morning days, no greeting like his welcome, no homage like his praise."

"A child's education should begin at least one hundred years before he was born."

"To be 70 years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be 40 years old."

"Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children."

"A moment's insight is sometimes worth a lifetime's experience."

"Beware how you take away hope from any human being."

"The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour upon it, the closer it contracts."

"A second class mind, but a first class temperament."

"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."

"Lawyers spend their professional careers shoveling smoke."

"IF ALL the trees in all the woods were men; And each and every blade of grass a pen; If every leaf on every shrub and tree Turned to a sheet of foolscap; every sea Were changed to ink, and all earth’s living tribes Had nothing else to do but act as scribes, And for ten thousand ages, day and night, The human race should write, and write, and write, Till all the pens and paper were used up, And the huge inkstand was an empty cup, Still would the scribblers clustered round its brink Call for more pens, more paper, and more Ink ❦"

"A good catchword can obscure analysis for fifty years."

"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."

"The interpretation of constitutional principles must not be too literal. We must remember that the machinery of government would not work if it were not allowed a little play in its joints."

"A river is more than an amenity, it is a treasure. It offers a necessity of life that must be rationed among those who have power over it."

"There are some men, who as they approach 70, read the Bible and prepare to die. Others prepare themselves to live to 90. It has been my observation that if a man prepares to live to 90, but dies at 70, no harm is done. If however, a man prepares to live to 70 but ends up dying at 90, then his last 20 years will be hell."

"Young man, the secret of my success is that at an early age I discovered that I was not God."

"The elaborate argument against the constitutionality of the Act if interpreted as we read it, in accordance with its obvious meaning does not need an elaborate answer."

"Some of her answers might excite popular prejudice, but 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."

"Courts are apt to err by sticking too closely to the words of a law where those words import a policy that goes beyond them."

"The power to tax is not the power to destroy while this Court sits."

"We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind....Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

"If in the long run the beliefs expressed in proletarian dictatorship are destined to be accepted by the dominant forces of the community, the only meaning of free speech is that they should be given their chance and have their way."

"Eloquence may set fire to reason."

"If I were dying, my last words would be, Have faith and pursue the unknown end."

"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."

"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."

"If a thing has been practised for two hundred years by common consent, it will need a strong case for the Fourteenth Amendment to affect it."

"A page of history is worth a volume of logic."

"Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife."

"Men must turn square corners when they deal with the Government."

"I always say, as you know, that if my fellow citizens want to go to Hell I will help them. It's my job."

"Only the emergency that makes it immediately dangerous to leave the correction of evil counsels to time warrants making any exception to the sweeping command, "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech.""

"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."