“"Laws and conditions that tend to debase human personality - a God-given force - be they brought about by the State or other individuals, must be relentlessly opposed in the spirit of defiance shown by St. Peter when he said to the rulers of his day: "Shall we obey God or man?" No one can deny that in so far as non-Whites are concerned in the Union of South Africa, laws and conditions that debase human personality abound.”

— Albert Lutuli

The Road to Freedom is via the Cross (1952)

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Albert Lutuli 14

South African politician 1898–1967

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“There are laws far more powerful for us Catholics, far more powerful than those espoused in Party political agendas and pushed by the vested interests of powerful pressure groups: Natural law, the structures of the human personality built into mankind by God the Creator into the mind and heart of human beings, and the Divine law, the law of Almighty God expressed in the Commandments and in the New Ways of Jesus Christ, illustrated so clearly in the Gospels; Divine and Natural Law which we must always obey and which can never be trumped by the Laws of man, however democratically expressed by Parliament – whichever Parliament – when they clash with the Laws of God. The Law of God is a much higher Law, the ultimate Law. To rebel against the design of the Creator is a grave matter indeed!”

Stephen Robson (1951) Bishop of Dunkeld

Bishop Stephen Robson’s homily https://www.dunkelddiocese.co.uk/chrism-mass-st-andrews-cathedral-2019/ (17 April 2019)

“One sole God;
One sole ruler, — his Law;
One sole interpreter of that law — Humanity.”

Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872) Italian patriot, politician and philosopher

Life and Writings: Young Europe: General Principles. No. 1., reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1923), p. 318

“God is Father of all mankind and is seeking to create a community in which His children will dwell together harmoniously and cooperatively as beloved kinsmen. Therefore attitudes and practices which debase personality or embitter human relations must be avoided.”

Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman

Property (1935)

“How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts the human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, (1963)

“A self-willed man obeys a different law, the one law I, too, hold absolutely sacred — the human law in himself, his own individual will.”

Bruce Lee (1940–1973) Hong Kong-American actor, martial artist, philosopher and filmmaker

Source: Striking Thoughts (2000), p. 19

“We meet here to express our deep resentment at the claim made by South Africa though its governments and parliaments since the union, to determine and shape our destiny without consulting our wishes, and arrogantly to assign us a position of permanent inferiority in our land, contrary to the plan and purpose of God our Creator, who created "all men equal." And into us too, not to whites only, He breathed the divine spirit of human dignity. And so we have every human and moral right to resist laws and policies which create a climate inimical to the full development of our personalities as individuals, and our development as a people.”

Albert Lutuli (1898–1967) South African politician

July 11, 1954.
Resist apartheid! (1954)

“We shouldn't be surprised that conditions in the universe are suitable for life, but this is not evidence that the universe was designed to allow for life. We could call order by the name of God, but it would be an impersonal God. There's not much personal about the laws of physics.”

Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author

Quoted in "Leaping the Abyss" (April 2002) by Gregory Benford, in Reason Magazine http://reason.com/archives/2002/04/01/leaping-the-abyss/4

“Despotic government supports itself by abject civilization, in which debasement of the human mind, and wretchedness in the mass of the people, are the chief criterions. Such governments consider man merely as an animal; that the exercise of intellectual faculty is not his privilege; that he has nothing to do with the laws but to obey them; and they politically depend more upon breaking the spirit of the people by poverty, than they fear enraging it by desperation.”

Thomas Paine (1737–1809) English and American political activist

1790s, Agrarian Justice (1797)

“All law relations are determined by this principle: each one must restrict his freedom by the possibility of the freedom of the other. … My freedom is limited by the freedom of the other only on condition that he limits his freedom by the conception of mine. Otherwise he is lawless. Hence, if a law-relation is to result from my cognition of the other, the cognition and the consequent limitation of freedom must have been mutual. All law-relation between persons is, therefore, conditioned by their mutual cognition of each other, and is, at the same time, completely determined thereby.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) German philosopher

Source: The Science of Rights 1796, P. 173-175

“The individual is the little conditioned, miserable, frustrated entity, satisfied with his little gods and his little traditions, whereas a human being is concerned with the total welfare, the total misery and total confusion of the world.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

1960s, Freedom From The Known (1969)
Context: I think there is a difference between the human being and the individual. The individual is a local entity, living in a particular country, belonging to a particular culture, particular society, particular religion. The human being is not a local entity. He is everywhere. If the individual merely acts in a particular corner of the vast field of life, then his action is totally unrelated to the whole. So one has to bear in mind that we are talking of the whole not the part, because in the greater the lesser is, but in the lesser the greater is not. The individual is the little conditioned, miserable, frustrated entity, satisfied with his little gods and his little traditions, whereas a human being is concerned with the total welfare, the total misery and total confusion of the world.

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Albert Lutuli 14

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