Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"We believed that it was most desirable that the North should win, we believed in the principle that the Union is indissoluable, we, or many of us at least, also believed that the conflict was inevitable, and that slavery had lasted long enough. But we equally believed that those who stood against us held just as sacred conviction that were the opposite of ours, and we respected them as every men with a heart must respect those who give all for their belief."

"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."

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

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

"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."