Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. quotes - page 12
These are the hands whose sturdy labor brings The peasant's food, the golden pomp of kings This is the page whose letters shall be seen, Changed by the sun to words of living green This is the scholar whose immortal pen Spells the first lesson hunger taught to men These are the lines that heavencommanded Toil Shows on his deed, the charter of the soil.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Our dead brothers still live for us and bid us think of life, not death -- of life to which in their youth they lent the passion and glory of Spring. As I listen, the great chorus of life and joy begins again, and amid the awful orchestra of seen and unseen powers and destinies of good and evil, our trumpets, sound once more a note of daring, hope, and will.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
As for us, our days of combat are over. Our swords are rust. Our guns will thunder no more. The vultures that once wheeled over our heads must be buried with their prey. Whatever of glory must be won in the council or the closet, never again in the field. I do not repine. We have shared the incommunicable experience of war; we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which such knowledge enables him to predict, not as a good one, who finds his reasons for conduct, whether inside the law or outside of it, in the vaguer sanctions of conscience.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The major premise of the conclusion expressed in a statute, the change of policy that induces the enactment, may not be set out in terms, but it is not an adequate discharge of duty for courts to say: We see what you are driving at, but you have not said it, and therefore we shall go on as before.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
