Old age is like an opium dream. Nothing seems real except the unreal.

It is perfectly easy to be original by violating the laws of decency and the canons of good taste.

Modesty and reverence are no less virtues of freemen than the democratic feeling which will submit neither to arrogance nor to servility.

The thing I want to do is put as many new ideas into the law as I can, to show how particular solutions involve general theory, and to do it with style. I should like to be admitted to be the greatest jurist in the world.

The common law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky, but the articulate voice of some sovereign or quasi sovereign that can be identified; although some decisions with which I have disagreed seem to me to have forgotten the fact.

There are many things which we can afford to forget which it is yet well to learn.

We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible.