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date: 08 February 2025

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. 1841–1935
American lawyer 

  1. We pause to…recall what our country has done for each of us and to ask ourselves what we can do for our country in return.
    speech, Keene, New Hampshire, 30 May 1884; see Kennedy
  2. It is better to be seventy years young than forty years old!
    reply to invitation from Julia Ward Howe to her seventieth birthday party, 27 May 1889
    Laura Richards and Maud Howe Elliott Julia Ward Howe (1916) vol. 2
  3. The great act of faith is when a man decides he is not God.
    letter to William James, 24 March 1907
  4. Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.
    ‘Natural Law’ (1918)
  5. The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic…The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.
    sometimes quoted as, ‘shouting fire in a crowded theatre’
    in Schenck v. United States (1919)