Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children.
Whatever disagreement there may be as to the scope of the phrase “due process of law” there can be no doubt that it embraces the fundamental conception of a fair trial, with opportunity to be heard.
The ideas of the classics, so far as living, are our commonplaces. It is the modern books that give us the latest and most profound conceptions. It seems to me rather a lazy makeshift to mumble over the familiar.
Who does not feel that Nansen’s account of his search for the Pole rather loses than gains in ideal satisfaction by the pretense of a few trifling acquisitions for science?
War? War is an organized bore.
The history of what the law has been is necessary to the knowledge of what the law is.
We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.
Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife.
I dare say that I have worked off my fundamental formula on you that the chief end of man is to frame general propositions and that no general proposition is worth a damn.
General propositions do not decide concrete cases. The decision will depend on a judgment or intuition more subtle than any articulate major premise.
Life, not the parson, teaches conduct.
My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins.
Certitude is not the test of certainty.
For my part I think it is a less evil that some criminals should escape, than that the government should play an ignoble part.
Systems die; instincts remain.
To have doubted one’s own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.
Men are tattooed with their special beliefs like so many South Sea Islanders; but a real human heart with divine love in it beats with the same glow under all the patterns of all earth’s thousand tribes.
I have always sought to guide the future-but it is very lonely sometimes trying to play God.
The man of action has the present, but the thinker controls the future.
A river is more than an amenity, it is a treasure.