Life & Wisdom Quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Order, in Holmes's telling, isn’t negotiated into existence; it’s imposed. The line lands with the cold clarity of someone watching political romanticism crash into human stubbornness. “Inconsistent kinds of worlds” is the key phrase: he’s not talking about policy squabbles or temperamental disagreements, but rival blueprints for reality itself. When two camps don’t merely want different answers but different premises, the shared language required for compromise evaporates.

Holmes was a poet, but this is the voice of a hard-nosed moral realist: progress isn’t a gentle unfolding, it’s a collision. The subtext is bracingly anti-sentimental about reason. Debate assumes a common world to debate within. Holmes is saying that sometimes the argument is precisely about what the world is allowed to be, and that kind of fight doesn’t end with better rhetoric. It ends when one side has the power to set the rules of the world everyone else has to inhabit.

Context matters. Holmes lived through a 19th-century America where “inconsistent worlds” weren’t theoretical: abolition and slavery, union and secession, industrial modernity and older social orders. In that environment, “remedy” sounds almost medical - as if force is an unpleasant but necessary surgery to prevent a body politic from dying.

What makes the quote work is its refusal to flatter the reader with civility myths. It’s not a celebration of violence so much as a bleak diagnosis of pluralism’s limits: when foundational visions clash, the final arbitrator isn’t persuasion, it’s power.