Oliver Wendell Holmes

“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.”

“To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.”

“Simple people... are very quick to see the live facts which are going on about them.”

“A few can touch the magic string, and noisy fame is proud to win them: Alas for those that never sing, but die with all their music in them!”

“Some people are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good.”

“The great act of faith is when a man decides he is not God.”

“It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.”

“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.”

“Stillness of person and steadiness of features are signal marks of good breeding.”

“Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.”

“Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground-floor. But if a man hasn't got plenty of good common sense, the more science he has, the worse for his patient.”

“The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may think what we like and say what we think.”

“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.”

“Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.”

“What a blessed thing it is, that Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left!”