A page of history is worth a pound of logic. - Oliver Wendell Holmes

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.

Academic life is but half life it is a withdrawal from the fight to utter smart things that cost you nothing except the thinking them from a cloister.

How odious a virtue the much praised simplicity. The only simplicity for which I would give a straw is that which is on the other side of the complex — not that which never has divined it.