End of the wonderful one-hoss shay.
Logic is logic. That’s all I say.

These lines come from Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.’s comic narrative poem “The Deacon’s Masterpiece; or, The Wonderful ‘One-Hoss Shay’,” first published in the Atlantic Monthly (1858) and later collected in The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858). The poem tells of a deacon who builds a chaise so perfectly balanced in workmanship that no single part will fail before any other. After exactly a century of use, the vehicle collapses all at once—an absurdly “logical” end to a machine designed with flawless uniformity. Holmes, a physician and man of letters, uses mock-technical reasoning and Yankee humor to satirize overconfident rationalism and “perfect” design.

The speaker’s refrain—“Logic is logic. That’s all I say.”—is deliberately deadpan: it treats a ridiculous outcome (a carriage disintegrating instantaneously after 100 years) as the inevitable product of impeccable reasoning. Holmes is playing with the gap between formal logic and lived reality. The lines underscore the poem’s central joke: if every component is made equally durable, then failure cannot occur gradually; it must arrive as a total, simultaneous collapse. More broadly, Holmes pokes fun at systems that prize internal consistency over practical truth, suggesting that “logical” conclusions can still be comically detached from how the world usually works.