Courts are apt to err by sticking too closely to the words of a law where those words import a policy that goes beyond them. - Oliver Wendell Holmes

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
“Most of my time is spent in doing as well as I can the work immediately at hand. One hopes that by doing quietly and without parade as solid work as one can when one is occupied, one makes the best contribution possible to one's state.

The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race. The practice of it, in spite of popular jests, tends to make good citizens and good men.

We believed that it was most desirable that the North should win, we believed in the principle that the Union is indissoluable, we, or many of us at least, also believed that the conflict was inevitable, and that slavery had lasted long enough. But we equally believed that those who stood against us held just as sacred conviction that were the opposite of ours, and we respected them as every men with a heart must respect those who give all for their belief.