197 Quotes by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.

People talk fundamentals and superlatives and then make some changes of detail.

I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy – I don’t disparage envy, but I don’t accept it as legitimately my master.

We expect more of ourselves than we have any right to.

Any tax is a discouragement and therefore a regulation so far as it goes.

The joy of life is to put out one’s power in some natural and useful or harmless way. There is no other. And the real misery is not to do this.

Free competition is worth more to society than it costs.

Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.

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.