“Due process is a growth too sturdy to succumb to the infection of the least ingredient of error.”

Every human being of adult years and sound mind has a legal right to determine what shall be done with his own body.

The risk to be percieved defines the duty to be obeyed.

The great tides and currents which engulf the rest of men do not turn aside in their course and pass the judges by.

Code is followed by commentary, and commentary by revision, and thus the task is never done.

Not honesty alone, but the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive, is then the standard of behavior.

Fraud includes the pretense of knowledge when knowledge there is none.

The great ideals of liberty and equality are preserved against the assaults of opportunism, the expediency of the passing hour, the erosion of small encroachments, the scorn and derision of those who have no patience with general principles.

Rest and motion, unrelieved and unchecked, are equally destructive.

No judicial system could do society’s work if each issue had to be decided afresh in every case which raised it.

Justice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances.

In truth, I am nothing but a plodding mediocrity – please observe, a plodding mediocrity – for a mere mediocrity does not go very far, but a plodding one gets quite a distance. There is joy in that success, and a distinction can come from courage, fidelity and industry.

The heroic hours of life do not announce their presence by drum and trumpet.

History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.

The judge is not the knight-errant, roaming at will in pursuit of his own ideal of beauty or of goodness.

Membership in the bar is a privilege burdened with conditions.

What has once been settled by a precedent will not be unsettled overnight, for certainty and uniformity are gains not lightly sacrificed. Above all is this true when honest men have shaped their conduct on the faith of the pronouncement.

Do unto others 20% better than you would expect them to do unto you, to correct for subjective error.

I have something that I call my Golden Rule. It goes something like this: ‘Do unto others twenty-five percent better than you expect them to do unto you.’ The twenty-five percent is for error.

Custom may lead a man into many errors; but it justifies none.

An autobiography is only ‘a sort of life’ – it may contain less errors of fact than a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely.

It takes sixty-five thousand errors before you are qualified to make a rocket.

Science, my boy, is composed of errors, but errors that it is right to make, for they lead step by step to the truth.

It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry.

A man protesting against error is on the way towards uniting himself with all men that believe in truth.