Skepticism is my only gospel, but I don't want to make a dogma out of it.

The mutual confidence on which all else depends can be maintained only by an open mind and a brave reliance upon free discussion.

Today in America vast concourses of youth are flocking to our colleges, eager for something, just what they do not know.

The profession of the law of which he [a judge] is a part is charged with the articulation and final incidence of the successive efforts towards justice; it must feel the circulation of the communal blood or it will wither and drop off, a useless member.

Life in a great society, or for that matter in a small, is a web of tangled relations of all sorts, whose adjustment so that it may be endurable is an extraordinarily troublesome matter.

There is something monstrous in commands couched in invented and unfamiliar language; an alien master is the worst of all. The language of the law must not be foreign to the ears of those who are to obey it.

Justice is the tolerable accommodation of the conflicting interests of society, and I don't believe there is any royal road to attain such accommodation concretely.