We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible.
Men, like peaches and pears, grow sweet a little while before they begin to decay.
You make me chuckle when you say that you are no longer young, that you have turned twenty-four. A man is or may be young to after sixty, and not old before eighty.
For my part I think it is a less evil that some criminals should escape, than that the government should play an ignoble part.
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.
There was never an idea started that woke up men out of their stupid indifference but its originator was spoken of as a crank.
The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas [and] the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.
The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what to do with genius.
The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.
We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.
If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it around. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it.
[The Constitution] is an experiment as all life is an experiment.
The minute a phrase, becomes current, it becomes an apology for not thinking accurately to the end of the sentence.
But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe...that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market... That at any rate is the theory of our constitution.
It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.
To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.
To know is not less than to feel.
Every man is an omnibus in which his ancestors ride.
We are all sentenced to capital punishment for the crime of living, and though the condemned cell of our earthly existence is but a narrow and bare dwelling-place, we have adjusted ourselves to it, and made it tolerably comfortable for the little while we are to be confined in it.
I have always sought to guide the future-but it is very lonely sometimes trying to play God.
To rest upon a formula is a slumber that, prolonged, means death.
Apologizing - a very desperate habit - one that is rarely cured. Apology is only egotism wrong side out.
Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief, and if believed it is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at its birth. The only difference between the expression of an opinion and an incitement is the speaker's enthusiasm for the result.
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.
As for the excellent little wretches who grow up in what they are taught, with never a scruple or a query, ... they signify nothing in the intellectual life of the race.
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