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General propositions do not decide concrete cases. The decision will depend on a judgment or intuition more subtle than any articulate major premise.

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.
Major
Premises
Judgment
Propositions
General
Concrete
Depends
Depend
Cases
Intuition
Decision
Subtle
Decide
Premise
Majors
Articulate

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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 man of action has the present, but the thinker controls the future.
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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.
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Certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.
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To us who remain behind is left this day of memories. Every year--in the full tide of spring, at the height of the symphony of flowers and love and life--there comes a pause, and through the silence we hear the lonely pipe of death.
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Men are tattooed with their special beliefs like so many South Sea Islanders but a real human heart with divine love in it beats with the same glow under all the patterns of all earth's thousand tribes.
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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.
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Society is always trying in some way to grind us down to a single flat surface.
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I dare say that I have worked off my fundamental formula on you that the chief end of man is to frame general propositions and that no general proposition is worth a damn.
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A great man represents a great ganglion in the nerves of society, or to vary the figure, a strategic point in the campaign of history, and part of his greatness consists in his being there.
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Our test of truth is a reference to either a present or imagined future majority in favour of our view.
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There is in all men a demand for the superlative, so much so that the poor devil that has no other way of reaching it attains it by getting drunk.
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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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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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The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.
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