Life & Wisdom Quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Holmes is doing that delicious 19th-century parlor trick: tossing a grenade into a room full of self-satisfied rationalists, then smiling as everyone scrambles to call it wisdom. “I hate facts” isn’t a confession of stupidity so much as a jab at the era’s growing faith that data, catalogues, and scientific positivism could domesticate the messy business of being human. He’s baiting you with an apparently anti-intellectual line, then pivoting to the deeper target: our appetite for big, tidy theories.

The joke turns on a double bind. The “chief end of man” echoes the solemn cadence of catechism - the sort of moral certainty that claims to explain what people are for. Holmes uses that preacherly authority to praise “general propositions,” then undercuts it: “no general proposition is worth a damn.” It’s a performance of skepticism, not a rejection of thinking. He’s mocking the human compulsion to build sweeping frameworks and then treat them as if they outrank lived experience.

Subtext: facts are not the enemy; fetishizing either facts or theories is. The line reads like an inoculation against dogma, whether it comes wearing the coat of religion, philosophy, or the new priesthood of “science” as a worldview rather than a method. Holmes, a poet with a doctor’s familiarity with bodies and limits, is warning that abstraction flatters the mind but often fails the world. The wit works because he commits the sin he condemns: he offers a general proposition about general propositions, daring you to notice the hypocrisy and keep thinking anyway.