312 quotes found
“Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.”
“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 freedo...”
“There are not infrequent times when a bottle of wine, a good dinner, a girl of some trivial sort can fill the hour for me.”
“Get down, you fool!”
“But as precedents survive like the clavicle in the cat, long after the use they once served is at an end, and the reason for them has been forgotten, the result of following them must often be fail...”
“It is the merit of the common law that it decides the case first and determines the principle afterwards.”
“The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience... The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only th...”
“The degree of civilization which a people has reached, no doubt, is marked by their anxiety to do as they would be done by.”
“State interference is an evil, where it cannot be shown to be a good.”
“It is now the moment when by common consent we pause to become conscious of our national life and to rejoice in it, to recall what our country has done for each of us, and to ask ourselves what we ...”
“I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.”
“We know that, if the armies of our war did anything worth remembering, the credit belongs not mainly to the individuals who did it, but to average human nature. We also know very well that we canno...”
“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 w...”
“The law, so far as it depends on learning, is indeed, as it has been called, the government of the living by the dead. To a very considerable extent no doubt it is inevitable that the living should...”
“I always say you can get your tragedy of any desired length in England, from thirty seconds to a lifetime. I had one adorable one of twenty-nine minutes by the watch. At the end of that time I star...”
“Free competition is worth more to society than it costs.”
“One of the eternal conflicts out of which life is made up is that between the effort of every man to get the most he can for his services, and that of society, disguised under the name of capital, ...”
“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.”
“The aim of the law is not to punish sins, but is to prevent certain external results.”
“Certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.”
