“The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from custom.”
Michel De Montaigne book Essays
Book I, Ch. 22. Of Custom
Essais (1595), Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Response to FDA complaint (1954)
Context: No man-made law ever, no matter whether derived from the past or projected onto a distant, unforeseeable future, can or should ever be empowered to claim that it is greater than the Natural Law from which it stems and to which it must inevitably return in the eternal rhythm of creation and decline of all things natural. This is valid, no matter whether we speak in terms such as "God," "Natural Law," "Cosmic Primordial Force," "Ether" or "Cosmic Orgone Energy."
“The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from custom.”
Michel De Montaigne book Essays
Book I, Ch. 22. Of Custom
Essais (1595), Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America
1770s, A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774)
Samuel Adams (1722–1803) American statesman, Massachusetts governor, and political philosopher
The Rights of the Colonists (1772)
Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) Italian Dominican scholastic philosopher of the Roman Catholic Church
Original: (la) Lex naturae […] nihil aliud est nisi lumen intellectis insitum nobis a Deo, per quod cognoscimus quid agendum et quid vitandum. Hoc lumen et hanc legem dedit Deus homini in creatione.
Source: On the Ten Commandments (c. 1273) Art. 1
Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India
Harijan (27 October 1946) p. 369
1940s
Susan Cooper (1935) English fantasy writer
Source: The Dark Is Rising (1965-1977), The Dark Is Rising (1973), Chapter 12 “The Hunt Rides” (pp. 224-225)
Herbert Spencer book Social Statics
Thus writes Blackstone, to whom let all honour be given for having so far outseen the ideas of his time; and, indeed, we may say of our time. A good antidote, this, for those political superstitions which so widely prevail. A good check upon that sentiment of power-worship which still misleads us by magnifying the prerogatives of constitutional governments as it once did those of monarchs. Let men learn that a legislature is not “our God upon earth,” though, by the authority they ascribe to it, and the things they expect from it, they would seem to think it is. Let them learn rather that it is an institution serving a purely temporary purpose, whose power, when not stolen, is at the best borrowed.
Pt. III, Ch. 19 : The Right to Ignore the State, § 2
Social Statics (1851)
George Woodcock (1912–1995) Canadian writer of political biography and history, an anarchist thinker, an essayist and literary critic
Prologue
Anarchism : A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (1962)
Context: Proudhon goes on to suggest that the real laws by which society functions have nothing to do with authority; they are not imposed from above, but stem from the nature of society itself. He sees the free emergence of such laws as the goal of social endeavour. … Proudhon conceiving a natural law of balance operating within society, rejects authority as an enemy and not a friend of order, and throws back at the authoritarians the accusations leveled at anarchists; in the process he adopts the title he hopes to have cleared of obloquy.
Kurt Gödel (1906–1978) logician, mathematician, and philosopher of mathematics
governing their formation
As quoted in "On 'computabilism’ and physicalism: Some Problems" by Hao Wang, in Nature’s Imagination (1995), edited by J. Cornwall, p.161-189