“When laws, customs, or institutions cease to be beneficial to man, they cease to be obligatory.”

Source: Life Thoughts (1858), p. 34

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "When laws, customs, or institutions cease to be beneficial to man, they cease to be obligatory." by Henry Ward Beecher?
Henry Ward Beecher photo
Henry Ward Beecher 75
American clergyman and activist 1813–1887

Related quotes

Emil M. Cioran photo

“Man is fulfilled only when he ceases to be man.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel photo
F. H. Bradley photo

“The man who has ceased to fear has ceased to care.”

F. H. Bradley (1846–1924) British philosopher

No. 63.
Aphorisms (1930)

Anthony Burgess photo

“Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.”

Variant: When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.
Source: A Clockwork Orange

Giacomo Casanova photo

“Man is free, but his freedom ceases when he has no faith in it”

Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) Italian adventurer and author from the Republic of Venice

.
Memoirs (trans. Machen 1894), book 1, Preface http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/c/casanova/c33m/preface2.html
Referenced

Friedrich Nietzsche photo

“Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions.”

Variant translation: Liberal institutions straightway cease from being liberal the moment they are soundly established: once this is attained no more grievous and more thorough enemies of freedom exist than liberal institutions.
Expeditions of an Untimely Man, 38
Twilight of the Idols (1888)
Context: My conception of freedom. — The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it — what it costs us. I give an example. Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions. One knows, indeed, what their ways bring: they undermine the will to power; they level mountain and valley, and call that morality; they make men small, cowardly, and hedonistic [genüsslich] — every time it is the herd animal that triumphs with them. Liberalism: in other words, herd-animalization...

James Longstreet photo
Karl Pearson photo
Jiddu Krishnamurti photo

“All these people try to excuse their brutality by saying that it is the custom; but a crime does not cease to be a crime because many commit it. Karma takes no account of custom; and the karma of cruelty is the most terrible of all.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

§ IV
1910s, At the Feet of the Master (1911)
Context: Then as to cruelty. This is of two kinds, intentional and unintentional. Intentional cruelty is purposely to give pain to another living being; and that is the greatest of all sins — the work of a devil rather than a man. You would say that no man could do such a thing; but men have done it often, and are daily doing it now. The inquisitors did it; many religious people did it in the name of their religion. Vivisectors do it; many schoolmasters do it habitually. All these people try to excuse their brutality by saying that it is the custom; but a crime does not cease to be a crime because many commit it. Karma takes no account of custom; and the karma of cruelty is the most terrible of all.

Related topics