Knowledge-it excites prejudices to call it science-is advancing as irresistibly, as majestically, as remorselessly as the ocean moves in upon the shore.
The very minute a thought is threatened with publicity it seems to shrink towards mediocrity.
Man has will, but woman has her way.
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.
Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.
We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep to the real and the true.
People talk fundamentals and superlatives and then make some changes of detail.
In my opinion, economists and sociologists are the people to whom we ought to turn more than we do for instruction in the grounds and foundations of all rational decisions.
Three generations of imbeciles are enough.
No generalization is wholly true – not even this one.
The thing I want to do is put as many new ideas into the law as I can, to show how particular solutions involve general theory, and to do it with style. I should like to be admitted to be the greatest jurist in the world.
Deep-seated preferences cannot be argued about-you cannot argue a man into liking a glass of beer.
To an imagination of any scope the most far reaching form of power is not money, it is the command of ideas.
Any tax is a discouragement and therefore a regulation so far as it goes.
But I have long thought that if you knew a column of advertisements by heart, you could achieve unexpected felicities with them. You can get a happy quotation anywhere if you have the eye.
Modesty and reverence are no less virtues of freemen than the democratic feeling which will submit neither to arrogance nor to servility.
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.
On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirms the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.
A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.
Between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force.