More - Oliver Wendell Quotes

Historic continuity with the past is not a duty, it is only a necessity

Oliver Wendell

 

A man over ninety is a great comfort to all his elderly neighbors: he is a picket-guard at the extreme outpost; and the young folks of sixty and seventy feel that the enemy must get by him before he can come near their camp.

Oliver Wendell

 Birthday

Liberty is often a heavy burden on a man.It involves the necessity for perpetual choicewhich is the kind of labor men have always dreaded.

Oliver Wendell

 

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.

Oliver Wendell

 

With crimson juice the thirsty southern day, Sucks from the hills where buried armies lie, So that the dreamy passion it imparts Is drawn from heroes' bones and lovers' hearts

Oliver Wendell

 

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 the time in which it is used

Oliver Wendell

 

Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide -that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life -are alike forbidden.

Oliver Wendell

 

When the last reader reads no more.

Oliver Wendell

 

A man may fulfil the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve.

Oliver Wendell

 

The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live.

Oliver Wendell

 Education