Certitude leads to violence. This is a proposition that has an easy application and a difficult one. The easy application is to ideoologues, dogmatists, and bullies--people who think that their rigtness justifies them in imposing on anyone who does not happen to suscribe to their particular ideology, dogma or notion of turf. If the conviction of rightness is powerful enough, resistance to it will be met, sooner or later by force. There are people like this in every sphere of life, and it is natural to feel that the world would be a better place without them!
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.Reason may be the lever, but sentiment gives you the fulcrum and the place to stand on if you want to move the world.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.But the word "right" is one of the most deceptive of pitfalls; it is so easy to slip from a qualified meaning in the premise to an unqualified one in the conclusion. Most rights are qualified.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.We are all sentenced to capital punishment for the crime of living, and though the condemned cell of our earthly existence is but a narrow and bare dwelling-place, we have adjusted ourselves to it, and made it tolerably comfortable for the little while we are to be confined in it.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.