Great Throughts Treasury

"It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes life worth living."

"Half the pleasure of life consists of the opportunities one has neglected."

"The aim of the law is not to punish sins, but is to prevent certain external results."

"Man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve."

"Most people will go to their graves with their music still in them."

"The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books."

"The great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving."

"The common law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky, but the articulate voice of some sovereign or quasi sovereign that can be identified; although some decisions with which I have disagreed seem to me to have forgotten the fact."

"The mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort."

"If I were dying, my last words would be, Have faith and pursue the unknown end."

"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."

"A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanging, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in colour and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used."

"A page of history is worth a volume of logic."

"Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife."

"The chief end of a man is to frame general ideas — and... no general idea is worth a damn."

"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."

"Free competition is worth more to society than it costs."

"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. It is a question of proximity and degree. When a nation is at war many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right."

"Eloquence may set fire to reason."

"The power to tax is not the power to destroy while this Court sits."

"It is only the present danger of immediate evil or an intent to bring it about that warrants Congress in setting a limit to the expression of opinion where private rights are not concerned."

"To allow opposition by speech seems to indicate that you think the speech impotent, as when a man says that he has squared the circle, or that you do not care whole-heartedly for the result, or that you doubt either your power or your premises. But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas —that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution."

"Only the emergency that makes it immediately dangerous to leave the correction of evil counsels to time warrants making any exception to the sweeping command, "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech.""

"Courts are apt to err by sticking too closely to the words of a law where those words import a policy that goes beyond them."

"Our test of truth is a reference to either a present or an imagined future majority in favor of our view."

"The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience... The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics."

"The riders in a race do not stop when they reach the goal. There is a little finishing canter before coming to a standstill. There is time to hear the kind voices of friends and say to oneself, The work is done."

"Consciously or unconsciously we all strive to make the kind of a world we like."

"State interference is an evil, where it cannot be shown to be a good."

"We know that, if the armies of our war did anything worth remembering, the credit belongs not mainly to the individuals who did it, but to average human nature. We also know very well that we cannot live in associations with the past alone, and we admit that, if we would be worthy of the past, we must find new fields for action or thought, and make for ourselves new careers. But, nevertheless, the generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its experience. 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. While we are permitted to scorn nothing but indifference, and do not pretend to undervalue the worldly rewards of ambition, we have seen with our own eyes, beyond and above the gold fields, the snowy heights of honor, and it is for us to bear the report to those who come after us."

"It is now the moment when by common consent we pause to become conscious of our national life and to rejoice in it, to recall what our country has done for each of us, and to ask ourselves what we can do for the country in return."

"As for us, our days of combat are over. Our swords are rust. Our guns will thunder no more. The vultures that once wheeled over our heads must be buried with their prey. Whatever of glory must be won in the council or the closet, never again in the field. I do not repine. We have shared the incommunicable experience of war; we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top."

"Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum."

"I think it not improbable that man, like the grub that prepares a chamber for the winged thing it never has seen but is to be — that man may have cosmic destinies that he does not understand."

"Life is a roar of bargain and battle, but in the very heart of it there rises a mystic spiritual tone that gives meaning to the whole. It transmutes the dull details into romance. It reminds is that our only but wholly adequate significance is as parts of the unimaginable whole. It suggests that even while living we are living to ends outside ourselves."

"Life is action, the use of one's powers. As to use them to their height is our joy and duty, so it is the one end that justifies itself."

"The human race is divided into two classes - those who go ahead and do something, and those who sit still and inquire, 'Why wasn't it done the other way?' "

"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."

"Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth."

"As life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time, at peril of being judged not to have lived."

"A Constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory.... It is made for people of fundamentally differing views, and the accident of our finding certain opinions natural and familiar, or novel, and even shocking, ought not to conclude our judgment upon the question whether statutes embodying them conflict with the Constitution of the United States."

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

"Young man, the secret of my success is that at an early age I discovered that I was not God."

"If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought -- not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate."

"I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization."

"This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice."