The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic... The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such...
Law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race.
After sixty years the stern sentence of the burial service seems to have a meaning that one did not notice in former years. There begins to be something personal about it.
Truth, when not sought after, rarely comes to light.
Except in cases of necessity which are rare leave your friend to learn unpleasant things from his enemies they are ready enough to tell him.
Men do not quit playing because they grow old they grow old because they quit playing.
If I were dying my last words would be: Have faith and pursue the unknown end.
When the style is fully formed if it has a sweet undersong we call it beautiful and the writer may do what he likes in words or syntax.
Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.
When I want to understand what is happening today or try to decide what will happen tomorrow I look back.
Talking is like playing on the harp there is as much in laying the hand on the strings to stop their vibrations as in twanging them to bring out their music.
The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars nor its great scholars great men.
The reward of a general is not a bigger tent - but command.
A man is a kind of inverted thermometer the bulb uppermost and the column of self-valuation is all the time going up and down.
The great act of faith is when a man decides that he is not God.
The morning cup of coffee has an exhilaration about it which the cheering influence of the afternoon or evening cup of tea cannot be expected to reproduce.
The longing for certainty ... is in every human mind. But certainty is generally illusion.
I hate facts. I always say the chief end of man is to form general propositions - adding that no general proposition is worth a damn.
The real religion of the world comes from women much more than from men - from mothers most of all, who carry the key of our souls in their bosoms.
Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.