Ant-Heap

While [Oliver Wendell] Holmes' influential Supreme Court opinions and dissents exemplified and eloquently immortalized the highest virtues of American jurisprudence, his private exchanges reveal a different man. Holmes reviled "do-gooders" and in 1909 he quipped to a friend, "I doubt if a shudder would go through the spheres if the whole ant-heap were kerosened." In 1915, writing to John Wigmore, dean of Harvard Law School, Holmes sneered at "the squashy sentimentalism of a big minority" of people, who made him "puke." He was similarly nauseated by those "who believe in the upward and onward-who talk of uplift, who think… that the universe is no longer predatory. Oh, bring me a basin."

--Edwin Black, "War Against The Weak: Eugenics And America's Campaign To Create A Master Race", p. 120