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Young feller, you will never appreciate the potentialities of the English language until you have heard a Southern mule driver search the soul of a mule.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

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Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Age: 93 †
Born: 1841
Born: March 8
Died: 1935
Died: March 6
Judge
Jurist
Lawyer
Philosopher
Politician
University Teacher
Boston
Massachusetts
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Oliver W. Holmes
Jr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr
Holmes
Oliver Wendell
Jr.
Oliver Wendell
Jr. Holmes
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Jr
Oliver Holmes
Jr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
jr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Jr.
Language
Mules
War
Driver
Young
Drivers
Soul
Southern
Never
Search
English
Feller
Appreciate
Mule
Heard
Potentialities

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Beware of making your moral staple consist of the negative virtues.
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A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.
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A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.
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The language of judicial decision is mainly the language of logic. And the logical method and form flatter that longing for certainty and for repose which is in every human mind. But certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.
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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, to get his services for the least possible return.
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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.
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Most people have died before they expire died to all earthly longings, so that the last breath is only, as it were, the locking of the door of the already deserted mansion.
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The mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort.
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The root of joy, as of duty, is to put all one's powers towards some great end.
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Free competition is worth more to society than it costs.
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Leisure only means a chance to do other jobs that demand attention.
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The life of the law has not been logic it has been experience.
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People talk fundamentals and superlatives and then make some changes of detail.
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In my opinion, economists and sociologists are the people to whom we ought to turn more than we do for instruction in the grounds and foundations of all rational decisions.
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I have always sought to guide the future-but it is very lonely sometimes trying to play God.
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Any tax is a discouragement and therefore a regulation so far as it goes.
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Modesty and reverence are no less virtues of freemen than the democratic feeling which will submit neither to arrogance nor to servility.
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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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Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it.
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The individual will always be a minority. If a man is in a minority of one, we lock him up.
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