“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.”

“If my fellow citizens want to go to Hell I will help them. Its my job.”

“The very minute a thought is threatened with publicity it seems to shrink towards mediocrity.”

“The rational study of law is still to a large extent the study of history. History must be a part of the study, because without it we cannot know the precise scope of rules which it is our business to know.”

“Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

“We are very quiet there, but it is the quiet of a storm centre. .”

“The petitioner may have a constitutional right to talk politics, but he has no constitutional right to be a policeman.”

“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.”

“Academic life is but half life it is a withdrawal from the fight to utter smart things that cost you nothing except the thinking them from a cloister.”

“The great thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are moving.”

“We have to choose, and for my part I think it a less evil that some criminals should escape than that the government should play an ignoble part.”

“Between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force.”

“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.”

“A man who called everyone a damn fool is like a man who damns the weather. He only shows that he is not adapted to his environment, not that the environment is wrong.”

“I detest a man who knows that he knows.”

“Every man has a right to do what he wills, provided he interferes not with a like right on the part of his neighbors.”

“Greatness is not in where we stand but in what direction we are moving. We must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it—but sail we must and not drift, nor lie at anchor.”

“Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.”

“A goose flies by a chart the Royal Geographic Society could not improve.”

“Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.”

“Every year, if not every day, we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge.”

“Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief and if believed it is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at birth. Eloquence may set fire to reason.”

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

“I believe that there are no innate, intrinsic differences among a human being , a baboon or a grain of sand.”