Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.

A new and valid idea is worth more than a regiment and fewer men can furnish the former than command the latter.

It is very grand to die in harness, but it is very pleasant to have the tight straps unbuckled and the heavy collar lifted from the neck and shoulders.

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.

For my part I think it is a less evil that some criminals should escape, than that the government should play an ignoble part.

Certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.

The world has its fling at lawyers sometimes, but its very denial is an admission. It feels, what I believe to be the truth, that of all secular professions this has the highest standards.