We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of the superstitious fears which were implanted in his imagination, no matter how utterly his reason may reject them.
as quoted in Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes by John T. Morse, Jr., p. 282
When I think thus of the law, I see a princess mightier than she who wrought at Bayeux [a place in Normandy whose name is given to a famous tapestry 224 feet in length], eternally weaving into her web dim figures of the ever-lengthening past — figures too dim to be noticed by the idle, too symbolic to be interpreted except by her pupils, but to the discerning eye disclosing every painful step and every world-shaking contest by which mankind has worked and fought its way from savage isolation to organic social life.
speech at the Suffolk Bar Association Dinner, February 5, 1885