It is urged in the first place that contempts cannot be cri… - Oliver Wendell Holmes

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It is urged in the first place that contempts cannot be crimes, because, although punishable by imprisonment, and therefore, if crimes, infamous, they are not within the protection of the Constitution and the Amendments giving a right to trial by jury, etc., to persons charged with such crimes. But the provisions of the Constitution are not mathematical formulas having their essence in their form; they are organic, living institutions transplanted from English soil. Their significance is vital, not formal; it is to be gathered not simply by taking the words and a dictionary, but by considering their origin and the line of their growth.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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About Oliver Wendell Holmes

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (8 March 1841 – 6 March 1935) was an American jurist and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1902 to 1932; he was often called "The Great Dissenter", and was the son of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

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Native Name: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Alternative Names: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. • Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr • Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr. • Oliver Wendell, Jr. Holmes • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr • Oliver Wendell Holmes, jr. • Oliver W. Holmes Jr. • Oliver Holmes Jr. • Oliver Holmes • Oliver W. Holmes

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Samuel Butler Learned Hand Robert A. Heinlein Edmund Burke John Locke

Additional quotes by Oliver Wendell Holmes

The interpretation of constitutional principles must not be too literal. We must remember that the machinery of government would not work if it were not allowed a little play in its joints.

Some of her answers might excite popular prejudice, but if there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.

If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which such knowledge enables him to predict, not as a good one, who finds his reasons for conduct, whether inside the law or outside of it, in the vaguer sanctions of conscience.

It is urged in the first place that contempts cannot be crimes, because, although punishable by imprisonment, and therefore, if crimes, infamous, the… - Oliver Wendell Holmes

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