Academic life is but half life it is a withdrawal from the fight to utter smart things that cost you nothing except the thinking them from a cloister.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

A child's education should begin at least 100 years before he was born.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

A goose flies by a chart the Royal Geographic Society could not improve.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

A man who called everyone a damn fool is like a man who damns the weather. He only shows that he is not adapted to his environment, not that the environment is wrong.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

But, nevertheless, the generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its experience. 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.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Certitude leads to violence. This is a proposition that has an easy application and a difficult one. The easy application is to ideologues, dogmatists, and bullies--people who think that their rightness justifies them in imposing on anyone who does not happen to subscribe to their particular ideology, dogma or notion of turf. If the conviction of rightness is powerful enough, resistance to it will be met, sooner or later by force. There are people like this in every sphere of life, and it is natural to feel that the world would be a better place without them!

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

If one of two or more joint wrongdoers has to pay all the damages, he cannot recover contribution from his fellows.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

I have never heard anyone profess indifference to a boat race. Why should you row a boat race? Why endure long months of pain in preparation of a fierce half hour, or even six minutes, that will leave you all but dead? Does anyone ask the question? Is there anyone who would not go through all its costs, and more, for the moment when anguish breaks into triumph - or even for the glory of having nobly lost? Is life less than a boat race? If a man gives all the blood in his body to win the one, will he not spend all the might of his soul to prevail in the other?

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.