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From: Newsweek
Date: 19991011
Author:McGrath, Peter

There's an old story about the love of ideas for their own sake: after his inauguration in 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt went to the Washington home of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. He wanted to pay his respects to the retired Supreme Court justice, at 92 considered perhaps the greatest living American. FDR found Holmes in his study, lingering over one of Plato's dialogues. "Why, Mr. Justice, are you reading Plato?" asked that most practical of politicians. He meant: why, at your age? Holmes replied, "To improve my mind, Mr. President."

Holmes was a lay intellectual, a ...

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