A trouble with a system of religious and moral teaching based on challenging the very idea of doctrine and authority was that it sowed the seeds of its own destruction. It was a losing proposition to tell a bright nineteen-year-old that he must cultivated his own sense of reason and conscience, then punish him for "indecorum" and "disrespectfulness" when he did so. Holmes's skepticism about human certainty would be powerfully reinforced in the cataclysmic events that were about to close in on him and his fellow members of the Class of 1861.
-Stephen Budiansky, Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas
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