The Great Dissenter.............

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Associate Justice of the
U. S. Supreme Court 1902-1932

"In this symposium my part is only to sit in silence.  To express one's feelings as the end draws near is too intimate a task.  But I may mention one thought that occurs to me as a listener-in.  The riders in the race do not stop short when they reach the goal.  There is a little finishing canter before coming to a standstill.  There is time to hear the kind words of friends and to say to oneself:  The work is done.  But just as one says that, the answer comes:  The race is over, but the work is never done while the power to work remains.  The canter that brings you to a standstill need not be only coming to rest.  It cannot be while you still live.  For to live is to function.  That is all there is in living.  And so I end with a line from a Latin poet who uttered the message more than fifteen hundred years ago: "Death plucks my ear and says, 'Live - I am coming.'"

-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., from his nationally broadcast radio address on his 90th birthday, March 8, 1931.