Daily Inspiration Quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Holmes lands the line like a verdict: strip away the ribbon-cuttings, medals, and lofty rhetoric, and you find the one trophy that reliably holds a powerful person’s attention - more power. It works because it’s both blunt and surgical. “Prize” is a deliberately belittling word here, shrinking public honors and moral claims into trinkets. The sting is in “much cared for”: Holmes isn’t denying that elites enjoy prestige or money, he’s saying those are secondary pleasures, valued mainly as instruments or proof of dominance. Power isn’t the means; it’s the appetite.

Coming from a jurist, the sentence doubles as a warning about institutions. Courts, legislatures, and bureaucracies like to present themselves as arenas of principle, but Holmes’s realism suggests a quieter engine: actors who frame ideals as strategy. The subtext isn’t nihilism so much as a demand for unsentimental design. If you assume leaders are motivated by virtue, you build systems that collapse under bad faith. If you assume they covet leverage, you build checks that still work when the rhetoric turns performative.

Holmes’s era matters. A Civil War veteran turned Supreme Court justice, he watched the U.S. harden into a modern state - industrial wealth, expanding federal authority, labor conflict, imperial ambition. In that context, the line reads as an antidote to patriotic self-mythology and the progressive-era faith that expertise alone purifies politics. Holmes doesn’t ask you to despair; he asks you to notice the incentive structure. The powerful, he implies, rarely retire from the game. They just rename the scoreboard.