“It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

“Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.”

“A mind that is stretched by new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”

“The first requirement of a sound body of law is, that it should correspond with the actual feelings and demands of the community, whether right or wrong.”

“We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of superstitious fears which were implanted in his imagination, no matter how utterly his reason may reject them.”

“I think that, 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.”

“The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.”

“To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.”

“Most people are willing to take the Sermon on the Mount as a flag to sail under, but few will use it as a rudder by which to steer.”

“We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep to the real and the true.”

“Every calling is great when greatly pursued.”

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

“If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I wouldn't pass it around. Wouldn't be doing anybody a favor. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't say embrace trouble. That's as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say, meet it as a friend, for you'll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it.”

“Don’t flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.”

“We have shared the incommunicable experience of war, we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top. In our youth our hearts were touched with fire.”

“A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; 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.”

“The man of action has the present, but the thinker controls the future.”

“The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract.”

“A child's education should begin at least 100 years before he was born.”

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

“I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy.”

“Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.”

“The young man knows the rules but the old man knows the exceptions.”

“I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.”