He that thinks with more extent than another, will want words of larger meaning.
— Samuel Johnson, The Idler, Number 70.
Mr. Johnson’s Language is suitable to his sentiments. He uses large words because he has large ideas.
— James Boswell, quoted on page xxiii in Edward G. Fletcher’s Introduction to Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson (New York, 1963).
The next lawyer joke I hear, I just might borrow from Justice Holmes:
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.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., The Path of the Law, 10 Harv. L. Rev. 457, 459 (1896)
[M]ake no mistake, some portion of the information governments call ‘intelligence’ is nothing more than an attentive reading of the news.
[P]eople aren’t evenly distributed anywhere, in anything. Gross disproportions are the norm, whether or not there is any discrimination going on.