“Infelicity is an ill to which all acts are heir which have the general character of ritual or ceremonial, all conventional acts.”

Part 1.3 Rights of Man
1790s, Rights of Man, Part I (1791)
Context: There never did, there never will, and there never can, exist a Parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the "end of time," or of commanding for ever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it; and therefore all such clauses, acts or declarations by which the makers of them attempt to do what they have neither the right nor the power to do, nor the power to execute, are in themselves null and void. Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the age and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow.

As quoted in "Q+A: William H. Macy Finds God" by Simon Abrams, in Esquire online (27 January 2012) http://www.esquire.com/the-side/qa/sundance-2012/william-h-macy-sundance-interview-6647129

The Philosophy of Antoninus

Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47, 52 (3 March 1919).
1910s

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), Egoism and Altruism, p. 96

Quotes By Salman

1960, Speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association

Bluebeard (1987)