To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man. - Oliver Wendell Holmes

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.

The law, so far as it depends on learning, is indeed, as it has been called, the government of the living by the dead. To a very considerable extent no doubt it is inevitable that the living should be so governed. The past gives us our vocabulary and fixes the limits of our imagination; we cannot get away from it. There is, too, a peculiar logical pleasure in making manifest the continuity between what we are doing and what has been done before. But the present has a right to govern itself so far as it can; and it ought always to be remembered that historic continuity with the past is not a duty, it is only a necessity.

Every calling is great when greatly pursued.