Quote from my reading: American Judicial Issues

“When Holmes came to the Bench, the burning issues of the day were labor’s grievances against the employer, and the people’s grievance against the corporations: two manifestations of the individual’s battle for survival in a collectivist world.”

Yankee from Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 278.

Quote from my reading: America

“A country that in Holmes’s youth had been rural in tone now rushed to build new cities. Jefferson’s fears had come to pass. Men lived piled upon one another, struggling for survival under smoking factory chimneys of which Jefferson could not have dreamed. By 1883, the transition from a rural to an industrial economy was gathering momentum; in the 1900s the ills attending it would be acute.”

Yankee from Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 278.

Quote from my reading: The Masses

“…Goethe had said the masses were always childish.”

Yankee from Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 277.

Quote from my reading; Challenge

“The place for a man who is complete in all his powers is in the fight.”

Yankee from Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 272.

Quote from my reading: Teaching

“Years ago, Holmes had become convinced that no man could actually teach another anything. All a teacher could do was to let his students be partners in his work—impart as it were a ferment….”

Yankee from Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 268.

Quote from my reading: Law

“Holmes approved the case system. Law only ends with a theory; it begins with a concrete case. Naturally, a student remembers an actual instance more vividly than a general principle.”

Yankee from Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 267.

Quote from my reading: Life

“God strike me, but sometimes I doubt there is any justice, any goodness, I doubt it all. Life, you see, crushes things deep inside us, it shatters our faith.”

Buddenbrooks. Thomas Mann, p. 730.

Quote from my reading: Study.

“One deep conviction remained: he knew himself to be only at the beginning. The years of study had completed nothing. They had merely opened a door.”

Yankee from Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen, 266.

Quote from my reading: Reward

“The only reward which I have promised myself is that a few men will say well done.”

Yankee from Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen, 265.

Quote from my reading: Law

“He was looking at the law pragmatically; he was saying that judge-made law is predicated according to its effect, not developed…according to precedent.”

Yankee from Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 257.

Quote from my reading: Law

“…he was saying that judicial decision does not derive wholly from precedent. He was saying that a good judge unconsciously predicts a law according to the result it will have upon the community at large.”

Yankee from Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 256.

Quote from my reading: Law

“The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy avowed or unconscious, even the prejudice which judges share with their fellow men, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed.”

Yankee from Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 256.

Quote from my reading: Jargon.

“He had always disliked what he called ‘the jargon of specialists’; it implied a kind of snobbism.”

Yankee from Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 255.

Quote from my reading: Time-Travel

Simon Morley wonders about whether he could go back from 1970 to live in the New York City of 1882:“Was it possible for me to go back and live out my life with Julia? Could I do that knowing the future? Could I live in nineteenth-century New York and look at infants in their carriages, knowing what lay ahead for them? It was a vanished world; actually nearly every soul in it long since dead: could I ever really join it?”

Time and Again. Jack Finney, p. 393.

Quote from my reading: America

Simon Morley meditates on whether he should let Julia stay in the twentieth century where she has come from the year 1882: “No, I won’t let you stay here. Julia, we’re a people who pollute the air we breathe. And our rivers. We’re destroying the Great Lakes; Erie is already gone, and now we’ve begun on the oceans. We filled our atmosphere with radioactive fallout that put poison in our children’s bones, and we knew it. We’ve made bombs that can wipe out humanity in minutes, and they are aimed and ready to fire. We ended Polio, and then the United States Army bred new strains of germs that can cause fatal, incurable disease. We had a chance to do justice to our Negroes, and when they asked it, we refused. In Asia we burned people alive, we really did. We allow children to grow up malnourished in the United States. We allow people to make money by using our television channels to persuade our own children to smoke, knowing what it is going to do them. This is a time when it becomes harder and harder to continue telling yourself that we are still good people. We hate ach other. And we’re used to it.” (1970)

Time and Again. Jack Finney, p. 378.