Quotes about laws (6497 quotes, page 15)

“Evidently Proclus does not advocate here simply a superstition, but science; for notwithstanding that it is occult, and unknown to our scholars, who deny its possibilities, magic is still a science. It is firmly and solely based on the mysterious affinities existing between organic and inorganic bodies, the visible productions of the four kingdoms, and the invisible powers of the universe. That which science calls gravitation, the ancients and the mediaeval hermetists called magnetism, attraction, affinity. It is the universal law, which is understood by Plato and explained in Timaeus as the attraction of lesser bodies to larger ones, and of similar bodies to similar, the latter exhibiting a magnetic power rather than following the law of gravitation. The anti-Aristotelean formula that gravity causes all bodies to descend with equal rapidity, without reference to their weight, the difference being caused by some other unknown agency, would seem to point a great deal more forcibly to magnetism than to gravitation, the former attracting rather in virtue of the substance than of the weight. A thorough familiarity with the occult faculties of everything existing in nature, visible as well as invisible; their mutual relations, attractions, and repulsions; the cause of these, traced to the spiritual principle which pervades and animates all things; the ability to furnish the best conditions for this principle to manifest itself, in other words a profound and exhaustive knowledge of natural law — this was and is the basis of magic.”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky book Isis Unveiled

Source: Isis Unveiled (1877), Volume I, Chapter VII

Nature , Knowledge , Universe , Science

“A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.”

Isaac Asimov book Runaround

"Runaround" in Astounding Science Fiction (March 1942); later published in I, Robot (1950)
The Three Laws of Robotics (1942)

“Laws are confusing documents. They get in the way of justice.”

Paolo Bacigalupi book The Windup Girl

Source: The Windup Girl (2009), p. 55

Justice , Way

“International law, like the moral law, is part of the law of England, but only to the extent that the Courts will not help those that break it.”

Sir Frederick Pollock, 1st Baronet (1783–1870) British lawyer and Tory politician

Attorney-General v. Sillem and others, "The Alexandra " (1864), 12 W. R. 258.

Help , Parting

“One of the most terrible things about the English education System in Ireland is its ruthlessness…it is cold and mechanical, like the ruthlessness of an immensely powerful engine. A machine vast, complicated… It grinds night and day; it obeys immutable and predetermined laws; it is as devoid of understanding, of sympathy, of imagination, as is any other piece of machinery that performs an appointed task. Into it is fed all raw human material in Ireland; it seizes upon it inexorably and rends and compresses and remoulds…”

Patrick Pearse (1879–1916) Irish revolutionary, shot by the British Army in 1916

The Cause Of Ireland, Liz Curtis, Beyond the Pale Publications, Belfast 1994, pg 190.This quote was taken from the original, in Padraig Pearse’s book The Murder Machine.

Education , Imagination , Understanding , Night

“Philosophers might care to ask themselves … how often they are accomplices in increasing the audience for a second-rate article simply because their introductory course needs a simple-minded version of a bad idea that even freshmen can refute. Some of the most frequently reprinted articles in twentieth-century philosophy are famous precisely because nobody believes them; everybody can see what's wrong with them. … The confirmation of this claim is left as an exercise for the reader. Among the memes that structure the infosphere and hence affect the transmission of other memes are the laws of libel.”

Daniel Dennett book Darwin's Dangerous Idea

Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)

Exercises , Idea

“On November 2, the entire civilised world will be praying, praying Bush loses. And Sod's law dictates he'll probably win, thereby disproving the existence of God once and for all. The world will endure four more years of idiocy, arrogance and unwarranted bloodshed, with no benevolent deity to watch over and save us. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr - where are you now that we need you?”

Charlie Brooker (1971) journalist, broadcaster and writer from England

The Guardian, 23 October 2004, Dumb show, http://home.valornet.com/rolandtignor/demoncrats20.htm http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/obama-barack-america-1981504-new-first
Guardian columns

God , World

“I'm an agnostic, but I understand that a book like the Bible that has been around as long as it has, because there is wisdom in it. People don't read over two thousand years, four thousand years, a book that doesn't have wisdom. Think of the story of Genesis. Adam and Eve were given paradise. It's better than anything that Nanci Pelosi promises, the garden of Eden, they didn't have to work, there was no pain, they lived forever, plucked fruit from the trees, but, there was one rule, which was: "Do not eat of the tree of Knowledge of good and evil", don't eat from that tree. Well, our foreparents were too ornery to obey that law and so they were expelled from the garden, and God put an angel with a flaming sword in the entrance to Eden. This is a very important parable for understanding where we are. An angel with a flaming sword to prevent human beings from returning to Eden, only by a divine hand, could we return. The whole agenda of the left, is to return us to Eden.”

David Horowitz (1939) Neoconservative activist, writer

Young America's Foundation conference at the Reagan Ranch Center in Santa Barbara - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sW2SFGIIqFI#t=06m45s
2013

Wisdom , God , Pain , People

“Yours of July 27 is received. It confirms the accounts we receive from others that the infractions of the embargo in Maine and Massachusetts are open. I have removed Pope, of New Bedford, for worse than negligence. The collector of Sullivan is on the totter. The Tories of Boston openly threaten insurrection if their importation of flour is stopped. The next post will stop it. I fear your Governor [Sullivan] is not up to the tone of these parricides, and I hope on the first symptom of an open opposition of the law by force you will fly to the scene, and aid in suppressing any commotion.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to General Henry Dearborn, Secretary of War (August 9, 1808) in regards to enforcing the American embargo.
1800s, Second Presidential Administration (1805-1809)

Fear , Hope , Flying

“Growing terrorism, permissive societies, democracy collapsing through lack of law and order. If things continue on their present track, the disintegration of Western societies will occur much sooner than you think under the hammer blows of fascism and communism. Freedom is not something that does not have a breaking point, and your enemies would like you to reach that point.”

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919–1980) Shah of Iran

As quoted in Jimmy Carter (1995), Keeping faith: memoirs of a president, page 444
Attributed

Democracy , Communication , Thinking , Freedom

“Men for whom divorce means walking out of their children’s lives except when they choose to see the children are the male equivalent of the adolescent feminists: men who want options without obligations. Morally, they have no right to walk out. A law that allows that is similarly immoral. “Primary Parent” laws are just such laws.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Father and Child Reunion (2001), p. 167.

Men , Children , Parent

“The truly tragic kind of suffering is the kind produced and defiantly insisted upon by the hero himself so that, instead of making him better, it makes him worse and when he dies he is not reconciled to the law but defiant, that is, damned. Lear is not a tragic hero, Othello is.”

W. H. Auden book Forewords and Afterwords

"The Greeks and Us", p. 21
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)

Suffering

“When the law can stop the blades of grass
From growing as they grow,
And when the leaves in summer time
Their verdure dare not show,
Then I will change the colour
I wear in my caubeen,
But till that day I'll stick for aye
To wearing of the green.”

Dion Boucicault (1820–1890) Irish actor and dramatist

The Wearing of the Green, in Arragh na Pogue, or the Wicklow Wedding (1864)

Grass , Change , Time , Summer

“Birth control itself, often denounced as a violation of natural law, is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives. So, in compliance with nature’s working plan, we must permit womanhood its full development before we can expect of it efficient motherhood. If we are to make racial progress, this development of womanhood must precede motherhood in every individual woman.”

Margaret Sanger book Woman and the New Race

Source: Woman and the New Race, (1922), Chapter 18, "The Goal"

Birth , Nature

“The belief that women are discriminated against in the workplace reinforces a couple's tendency to have the woman stay at home. It is the tendency for women to stay at home that makes the workplace value her less. then, shortly after she is married, it begins to make sense for her to move for her husband's career, not for her husband to move for her career. Conversely, it makes sense for them to invest in his medical, law, or engineering degree--rather than hers… ironically, then, a reality has been created from a false reality. And, ironically, women's careers are hurt via comments meant to prod a society into helping women's careers. The road to hell is paved…”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Why Men Earn More (2005), p. 145.

Women , Home , Hell , Reality

“When I dug into this temple, which had been destroyed by the Christians, I was shocked… I was barely 15, yet I understood in a powerful hands-on, nonintellectual way, how harsh had been Europe's conversion to Christianity. They burned temples, smashed statues, massacred the priests and established extremely harsh laws. By 392 ce, Paganism died.”

Christopher Gérard (1962)

Pagan Power in Modern Europe (1999)

Way

“I worship impersonal Nature, which is neither "good" or "bad", and who knows neither love nor hatred. I worship Life; the Sun, Sustainer of life. I believe in the Law of everlasting struggle, which is the law of life, and in the duty of the best specimens of our race — the natural élite of mankind — to rule the earth, and evolve out of themselves a caste of supermen, a people 'like unto the Gods.'”

Savitri Devi book Pilgrimage

Pilgrimage (Calcutta: Savitri Devi Mukherji, 1958, p. 327, http://www.savitridevi.org/pilgrimage-09.html)

Love , Life , God , People

“This whole theory [of John Law and Jean Terrasson], as dear to French financial schemers in the eighteenth century as to American "Greenbackers" in the nineteenth, had resulted, under the Orleans Regency and Louis XV, in ruin to France financially and morally, had culminated in the utter destruction of all prosperity, the rooting out of great numbers of the most important industries, and the grinding down of the working people even to starvation.”

Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) American politician

Source: Seven Great Statesmen in the Warfare of Humanity with Unreason (1915), p. 169-170

People

“Critics argue that Hayek mixed a number of ethical and political philosophies in constructing his system, positions that do not necessarily cohere one with another and all of which have been independently criticized. … There are evident tensions as well between his earlier advocacy of planning a framework of law and his later enthusiasm for the gradual evolution of judge-made common law. Finally, Hayek's opinion that judges operating under the common law tradition are bound to draw "conclusions that follow from the existing body of rules and the particular facts of the case" has struck more than one observer as naive. If one is judging his work against the standard of whether he provided a finished political philosophy, Hayek clearly did not succeed.”

Bruce Caldwell (economist) (1952) economic historian

Source: Hayek's Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F. A. Hayek (2004), Ch. 14 : Journey’s End—Hayek’s Multiple Legacies

Drawing

“People crushed by law, have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws; and those who have much to hope and nothing to lose, will always be dangerous.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Letter to Charles James Fox (8 October 1777)
1770s

People , Hope

“The 'state' on the modern conception is a legally defined term which refers, at the level of substance, to a state power that possesses both internal and external sovereignty, at the spatial level over a clearly delimited terrain (the state territory) and at the social level over the totality of members (the body of citizens or the people). State power constitutes itself in the forms of positive law, and the people is the bearer of the legal order whose jurisdiction is restricted to the state territory. In political usage, the concepts 'nation' and 'people' have the same extension. But in addition to its legal definition, the term 'nation' has the connotation of a political community shaped by common descent, or at least by a common language, culture, and history. A people becomes a 'nation' in this historical sense only in the concrete form of a particular form of life.”

Jürgen Habermas book The Inclusion of the Other

Habermas (1998) The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory. Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff, eds. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Life , People , History , Communication

“Nor are the general laws of economics "institutional." They work in an institutional setting, and upon institutional material; institutions supply much of their content and furnish the machinery by which they work themselves out, more or less quickly and completely, in different actual situations. Institutions may determine the alternatives of choice and fix the limits of freedom of choice, but the general laws of choice among competing motives or goods are not institutional unless rational thinking and an objective world are institutions, an interpretation which would make the term meaningless. Economic activity consists in the use of certain resources by certain processes, to produce "wealth." The content of the concept wealth is largely institutional, and the resources available and processes known and used at any place and time for producing wealth are in a sense historical products; but there are general laws of production and consumption which hold good whatever specific things are thought of as wealth and whatever productive factors and processes in use.”

Frank Knight (1885–1972) American economist

Source: "The limitations of scientific method in economics", 1924, p. 129 (2009 edition)

World , Motivation , Thinking , Sense

“This naive manner of conceptualizing capitalism by reference to a “pursuit of gain” must be relegated to the kindergarten of cultural history methodology and abandoned once and for all. A fully unconstrained compulsion to acquire goods cannot be understood as synonymous with capitalism, and even less as its “spirit.” On the contrary, capitalism can be identical with the taming of this irrational motivation, or at least with its rational tempering. Nonetheless, capitalism is distinguished by the striving for profit, indeed, profit is pursued in a rational, continuous manner in companies and firms, and then pursued again and again, as is profitability. There are no choices. If the entire economy is organized according to the rules of the open market, any company that fails to orient its activities toward the chance of attaining profit is condemned to bankruptcy.
Let us begin by defining terms in a manner more precise than often occurs. For us, a "capitalist" economic act involves first of all an expectation of profit based on the utilization of opportunities for exchange; that is of (formally) peaceful opportunities for acquisition. Formal and actual acquisition through violence follows its own special laws and hence should best be placed, as much as one may recommend doing so, in a different category. Wherever capitalist acquisition is rationally pursued, action is oriented to calculation in terms of capital. What does this mean?”

Max Weber (1864–1920) German sociologist, philosopher, and political economist

Prefatory Remarks to Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion (1920)

Peace , History , Motivation , Chance

“Of course, violence is never justified. But seen in this context – amid a highly toxic environment, defined by mistrust and resentment, stoked by years of bad feelings, and spurred by illegal and misguided practices – it is not difficult to imagine how a single tragic incident set off the city of Ferguson like a powder keg. In a sense, members of the community may not have been responding only to a single isolated confrontation, but also to a pervasive, corrosive, and deeply unfortunate lack of trust – attributable to numerous constitutional violations by their law enforcement officials including First Amendment abuses, unreasonable searches and seizures, and excessive and dangerous use of force; exacerbated by severely disproportionate use of these tactics against African Americans; and driven by overriding pressure from the city to use law enforcement not as a public service, but as a tool for raising revenue.”

Eric Holder (1951) 82nd Attorney General of the United States

2010s, Update on Investigations in Ferguson (2015)

Feeling , Imagination , Search , Communication

“No man has a right to disturb the public peace, by personally resisting the execution of a law however bad. He ought to acquiesce, using at the same time the utmost powers of his reason, to promote its repeal.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

Article 9
"Declaration of Rights" http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/PShelley/declarat.html (1812)

Peace , Time , Personality

“Two things form the bedrock of any open society—freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don’t have those things, you don’t have a free country.”

Salman Rushdie (1947) British Indian novelist and essayist

The Times of India, ‘Don’t allow religious hooligans to dictate terms’ http://archive.is/ecOpa (16 January 2008)

Freedom , Country

“It is the duty of a king to enforce, if he can, those royal laws which have become proverbial owing to their principles of justice and mercy. But if owing to change of time and circumstances he is unable to enforce the laws of the ancients (i. e. ancient Muslim rulers), he should, with the counsel of wise men… frame laws suited to his time and circumstances and proceed to enforce them. Much reflection is necessary in order that laws, suited to his reign, are properly framed.”

Ziauddin Barani (1285–1357) Indian Muslim historian and political thinker (1285–1357)

Fatawa-i-Jahandari, p.64. quoted from Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 4
Fatawa-i-Jahandari

Men , Justice , Change , Time

“But I was very unwilling to give up my belief; I feel sure of this, for I can well remember often and often inventing day-dreams of old letters between distinguished Romans, and manuscripts being discovered at Pompeii or elsewhere, which confirmed in the most striking manner all that was written in the Gospels. But I found it more and more difficult, with free scope given to my imagination, to invent evidence which would suffice to convince me. Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress.Although I did not think much about the existence of a personal God until a considerably later period of my life, I will here give the vague conclusions to which I have been driven. The old argument from design in Nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows. But I have discussed this subject at the end of my book on the Variation of Domesticated Animals and Plants, and the argument there given has never, as far as I can see, been answered.”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

volume I, chapter VIII: "Religion", pages 308-309 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=326&itemID=F1452.1&viewtype=image

Francis Darwin calls these "extracts, somewhat abbreviated, from a part of the Autobiography, written in 1876". The original version is presented below.
The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887)
Variant: p>But I was very unwilling to give up my belief;—I feel sure of this for I can well remember often and often inventing day-dreams of old letters between distinguished Romans and manuscripts being discovered at Pompeii or elsewhere which confirmed in the most striking manner all that was written in the Gospels. But I found it more and more difficult, with free scope given to my imagination, to invent evidence which would suffice to convince me. Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct. I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished.And this is a damnable doctrine.Although I did not think much about the existence of a personal God until a considerably later period of my life, I will here give the vague conclusions to which I have been driven. The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows. Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws. But I have discussed this subject at the end of my book on the Variation of Domesticated Animals and Plants, and the argument there given has never, as far as I can see, been answered.</p

Imagination , Animals , Personality , Thinking

“Judges ought to remember, that their office is jus dicere, and not jus dare; to interpret law, and not to make law, or give law.”

Francis Bacon book Essays

Of Judicature
Essays (1625)

“Our generation can change this. We know what the problems are and we know what the solutions are, but we have to demand that our elected officials and business leaders take action. At the federal and state level, we have to fight efforts to repeal equal pay laws. We have to support increases in the minimum wage. And we have to demand that the United States join our global competitors in giving workers paid leave. All these issues affect our individual financial health and the strength of our collective economy.”

Sandra Fluke (1981) American women's rights activist and lawyer

CNN, (April 17, 2012).
Articles

Health , Business , Support , Problem

“MacUser: Which person do you most admire?
Jef Raskin: For what attribute? Once again you ask a question that linearises a complex matter. I can name many. Let's start with people named George: George Cantor for moving infinity out of philosophy into mathematics, George Washington for showing how a leader should relinquish power, and George Bernard Shaw for his humanity… Or we can do it by subject and admire Aristotle, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein for their pulling from nature comprehensible laws; or Euclid, Gauss and Gödel for their contributions to mathematics; or people who have influenced me very directly, in which case I'd mention my very admirable parents and the teacher who taught me to be intellectually independent, L R Genise; or how about Claude Shannon without whose work on information theory I would have been lost.”

Jef Raskin (1943–2005) American computer scientist

MacUser interview (2004)

People , Mathematics , Question , Nature

“Logic is not concerned with human behavior in the same sense that physiology, psychology, and social sciences are concerned with it. These sciences formulate laws or universal statements which have as their subject matter human activities as processes in time. Logic, on the contrary, is concerned with relations between factual sentences (or thoughts). If logic ever discusses the truth of factual sentences it does so only conditionally, somewhat as follows: if such-and-such a sentence is true, then such-and-such another sentence is true. Logic itself does not decide whether the first sentence is true, but surrenders that question to one or the other of the empirical sciences.”

Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) German philosopher

Rudolf Carnap (1937) cited in: Irving J. Lee (1967) The Language of Wisdom and Folly: Background Readings in Semantics. International Society for General Semantics, p. 44

Truth , Behavior , Question , Sense

“No matter how much women prefer to lean, to be protected and supported, nor how much men desire to have them do so, they must make the voyage of life alone, and for safety in an emergency they must know something of the laws of navigation.”

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) Suffragist and Women's Rights activist

Solitude of Self (1892)

Life , Women , Men , Support

“That statement can not be too much emphasized. The country's growth has compelled the Federal establishment to exceed by far the Government plants of even the greatest States. With this growth in physical extent, in revenue, in personnel, there has inevitably been the suggestion that the Federal Government was overshadowing the States. Yet the State governments deal with far more various and more intimate concerns of the people than does the National Government. All the operations of the minor civil divisions, parishes, wards, school districts, towns, cities, counties, and the like, are dependencies of the State. The maintenance of order through police, the general business of enforcing law, is left to the States. So is education.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, The Reign of Law (1925)

People , Education , School , Business

“But what is lawful for all extends across wide-ruling aether and, without cease, through endless sunshine.”

Empedocles (-490–-430 BC) ancient Greek philosopher

fr. 135, as quoted in Aristotle's Rhetoric, 1373 b16
Purifications

“A government of laws, and not of men.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

No. 7; this was incorporated into the Massachusetts Constitution in 1780
1770s, Novanglus essays (1774–1775)

Men

“I love filmmaking when fate is a part of the process and you are dependent on the laws of physics and the elements to get a single moment that transports or in some way creates an illusion even for a moment. I think that is tremendous fun and what I think filmmaking is, catching lightning in a bottle. I feel like we are so used to CGI now and thank god because it is a wonderful tool, but there is an element of everything you are looking at has been created in the comfort of a studio. I want to return to a world where I can celebrate when you are really interacting with the world.”

Larry Fessenden (1963) American actor, producer, writer, director, film editor, and cinematographer

Interview with 'Beneath' director Larry Fessenden https://www.axs.com/interview-with-beneath-director-larry-fessenden-92769 (March 25, 2014)

Love , God , Fate , World

“Most gun dealers follow the law and run honest businesses. But the statistics show that 1 percent of dealers sell more than half of all illegal guns. Why isn't the federal government going after them? Here's one reason: unlike mayors, members of Congress don't get a phone call in the middle of the night when a cop is shot and killed. They don't deliver the eulogies.”

Michael Bloomberg (1942) American businessman and politician, former mayor of New York City

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18248547/site/newsweek/
Gun Control

Business , Night

“To say that the law of force is abandoned because force is regular, unopposed, and beneficially exercised, is to say that day and night are now such well-established institutions that the sun and moon are mere superfluities.”

James Fitzjames Stephen (1829–1894) Indian judge

Source: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873-1874), Ch. 5

Exercises , Sun , Night

“Far too often, Christians have accepted the common secular view that we are the masters of animals, their rulers or owners — utterly forgetting that the dominion promised to humanity is a deputized dominion, in which we are to stand before creation as God's vice-regents, putting into effect not our own egotistical wants but God's own law of love and mercy. And yet, when one begins to challenge our despotic treatment of animals — whether killing for sport, the ruthless export trade, or (to take the latest example) the quite obscene slaughter of thousands of seals for their penises, to be sold as aphrodisiacs in Europe and Asia — again and again, one has to face this humanistic dogma: If it benefits humanity, it must be right.”

Andrew Linzey (1952) British theologian and divine

Source: Animal Gospel: Christian Faith as if Animals Mattered (1998), p. 12

Love , God , Sport , Animals

“[T]he constitution controls any legislative act repugnant to it.... It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.... So if a law be in opposition to the constitution; if both the law and the constitution apply to a particular case, so that the court must either decide that case conformably to the law, disregarding the constitution; or conformably to the constitution disregarding the law; the court must determine which of these conflicting rules governs the case. This is the very essence of judicial duty.... Those then who controvert the principle that the constitution is to be considered, in court, as a paramount law, are reduced to the necessity of maintaining that courts must close their eyes on the constitution, and see only the law. This doctrine would subvert the very foundation of all written constitutions... It would be giving the legislature a practical and real omnipotence... The judicial power of the United States is extended to all cases arising under the constitution.”

John Marshall (1755–1835) fourth Chief Justice of the United States

5. U.S. (1 Cranch) 137
Marbury v. Madison (1803)

“The main Roman contribution to the idea of property lay in the realm of law. Roman jurists were the first to formulate the concept of absolute private ownership, which they called dominium… Roman jurisprudence went to great lengths to stipulate every conceivable nuance of property rights: how acquired and how lost, how transferred, how sold. The rights implicit in dominium were so absolute that ancient Rome knew nothing of eminent domain.”

Richard Pipes (1923–2018) American historian

Source: Property and Freedom (1999), p. 11

Idea

“Many if not most of Kissinger's partners in crime are now in jail, or are awaiting trial, or have been otherwise punished or discredited. His own lonely impunity is rank; it smells to heaven. If it is allowed to persist then we shall shamefully vindicate the philosopher Anacharsis, who mantained that laws were like cobwebs; strong enough to detain only the weak, and too weak to hold the strong. In the name of innumerable victims known and unknown, it is time for justice to take a hand.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

[The Trial of Henry Kissinger, 2002, 1859846319, 46240330, [E840.8.K58 H58 2001]]
2000s, 2002

Justice , Strong , Time

“One may well wonder at the short-sightedness of those who ignore the characteristics which so clearly distinguish different things and declare that the laws of Solon and Lycurgus are all-sufficient to secure the greatest of republics, Athens and Sparta, because their sovereign authority is loyally accepted by those who enjoy that citizenship, yet deny that right reason, which is the fountain head of all other law, can impart freedom to the wise, who obey all that it prescribes or forbids.”

Philo (-15–45 BC) Roman philosopher

47.
Every Good Man is Free

Freedom

“Because a cause was taken to be sufficient for its effect, nothing was required to explain the effect other than the cause. Consequently, the quest for causes was environment-free. It employed what we now call 'closed-system' thinking. Laws. —like that of freely falling bodies—-were formulated so as to exclude environmental effects.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Source: 1970s, Redesigning the future, 1974, p. 10.

Thinking

“Because suffering is the exhibition of the presence in our existence of that which is not under our control, or of the intrusion into our self-legislating existence of an activity operating under another law than ours, it cannot be brought adequately within the spheres of teleological and deontological ethics, the ethics of man-the-maker, or man-the-citizen.”

H. Richard Niebuhr (1894–1962) American theologian

Source: The Responsible Self: An Essay in Christian Moral Philosophy (1963), p. 61

Suffering

“There is not something fundamentally different about the American DNA that causes us to have a level of gun violence that is 20 times that of other first-world nations…. It happens here because we choose to allow it to happen. We have a celebratory culture of guns, and the loosest firearms laws in the world.”

Chris Murphy (1973) American politician

"Meet the Senator Who Filibustered for 15 Hours on Gun Control" http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/meet-the-senator-who-filibustered-for-15-hours-on-gun-control-20160620, RollingStone.com, 20 June 2016.

World , Time

“From 1931 to 1935, I was an undergraduate at Cambridge in my father's old college, Gonville and Caius, which was particularly strong in medicine and the law. However, after two years of law I switched to economics, much to my father's disappointment. At that time the world was in the depth of the great depression and my motive for wanting to change subject was the belief, bred of youthful ignorance and optimism, that if only economics were better understood, the world would be a better place.”

Richard Stone (1913–1991) British economist, Nobel Memorial Prize winner

"Richard Stone - Biographical," 1984

Youth , World , Disappointment , Motivation

“If I made laws for Shakers or a school, I should gazette every Saturday all the words they were wont to use in reporting religious experience, as “spiritual life,” “God,” “soul,” “cross,” etc., and if they could not find new ones next week, they might remain silent.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

June 15, 1844
1820s, Journals (1822–1863)

Life , God , School , Soul

“States should practice multilateralism and abandon unilateral actions that adversely affect a democratic and equitable international order, refraining from the threat or use of force. They should apply international law uniformly, abandon overreliance on “positivism” and efforts to circumvent treaty obligations or invent loopholes. As “nature abhors a vacuum” (Spinoza, Ethics), human rights law abhors “legal black holes””

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

United Nations General Assembly - Promotion of a democratic and equitable international order http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/IntOrder/A-68-284_en.pdf.
2013

Nature , Effort

“We have confused the real issue of parliamentary democracy, for already there has been a fundamental change. The power of electors over their law-makers has gone, the power of MPs over Ministers has gone, the role of Ministers has changed. The real case for entry has never been spelled out, which is that there should be a fully federal Europe in which we become a province. It hasn't been spelled out because people would never accept it. We are at the moment on a federal escalator, moving as we talk, going towards a federal objective we do not wish to reach. In practice, Britain will be governed by a European coalition government that we cannot change, dedicated to a capitalist or market economy theology. This policy is to be sold to us by projecting an unjustified optimism about the Community, and an unjustified pessimism about the United Kingdom, designed to frighten us in. Jim quoted Benjamin Franklin, so let me do the same: "He who would give up essential liberty for a little temporary security deserves neither safety nor liberty." The Common Market will break up the UK because there will be no valid argument against an independent Scotland, with its own Ministers and Commissioner, enjoying Common Market membership. We shall be choosing between the unity of the UK and the unity of the EEC. It will impose appalling strains on the Labour movement… I believe that we want independence and democratic self-government, and I hope the Cabinet in due course will think again.”

Tony Benn (1925–2014) British Labour Party politician

Speech given in the Cabinet meeting to discuss Britain's membership of the EEC, as recorded in his diary (18 March 1975), Against the Tide. Diaries 1973-1976 (London: Hutchinson, 1989), pp. 346-347.
1970s

People , Hope , Quotes , Democracy

“The case for originalism is quite different. It is that in our system of government, written laws (statutes and constitutional provisions) are supposed to provide stable rules around which society can organize itself. Such rules are presumed to remain in place until amended or repealed by the people. Originalism is aimed at preserving the laws enacted by the people or their representatives, and at preserving stability and predictability in our legal system.”

Thomas Rex Lee (1964) Utah Supreme Court justice

A Dialogue with Utah Supreme Court Justice Thomas R. Lee https://web.archive.org/web/20150120094848/www.attorneyatlawmagazine.com/salt-lake-city/dialogue-utah-supreme-court-justice-thomas-r-lee/

People

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Aurobindo, from a letter of Sri Aurobindo that C.R. Das was reading out while defending him in the Alipore Bomb Trial. C.R. Das Speech in defence of Aurobindo Ghosh in the Maincktala Bomb Case. The judgement was issued in 1909. Source: Collected Works of Deshbandhu.

Life , Dreams , Idea , Nature

“If you stand up to people, they'll respect you for it. I had an e-mail from a Cambridge University American law student, and he said, 'You are an evil f------ man,' so I called him up - he put his telephone number on it - and I said, 'I'm going to call the police if I have any more messages like this from you. This is an abusive, threatening letter.' And he invited me to give a lecture. I couldn't do it, but I would have done it if I'd had the time.”

Robert Fisk (1946) English writer and journalist

A reporter who thinks objective journalism is a synonym for government mouthpiece http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/11/02/INGRU2KJHA1.DTL, November 2, 2003
2003

People , Universe , Evil , Time

“Linden Arden stole the highlights
With one hand tied behind his back.
Loved the morning sun and whiskey
Ran like water in his veins.
Loved to go to church on Sunday,
Even though he was a drinkin' man.
When the boys came to San Francisco,
They were looking for his life.
But he found out where they were drinking,
Met them face to face outside.
Cleaved their heads off with a hatchet,
Lord, he was a drinkin' man.
And when somebody tried to get above him,
He just took the law into his own hands.
Linden Arden stole the highlights,
And they put his fingers through the glass.
He had heard all those stories many, many times before,
And he did not care, nor know, to ask.
And he loved the little children like they were his very own.
You say 'Someday, he may get lonely,
Now he's livin', livin' with a gun.”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

Linden Arden Stole the Highlights
Song lyrics, Veedon Fleece (1974)

Love , Life , Children , Boy

“According to the ancient doctrines, the soulless elemental spirits were evolved by the ceaseless motion inherent in the astral light. Light is force, and the latter is produced by the will. As this will proceeds from an intelligence which cannot err, for it has nothing of the material organs of human thought in it, being the superfine pure emanation of the highest divinity itself — (Plato's "Father") it proceeds from the beginning of time, according to immutable laws, to evolve the elementary fabric requisite for subsequent generations of what we term human races. All of the latter, whether belonging to this planet or to some other of the myriads in space, have their earthly bodies evolved in the matrix out of the bodies of a certain class of these elemental beings which have passed away in the invisible worlds.”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky book Isis Unveiled

Source: Isis Unveiled (1877), Volume I, Chapter VII

World , Intelligence , Light , Time

“I am fully assured, that no general method for the solution of questions in the theory of probabilities can be established which does not explicitly recognize, not only the special numerical bases of the science, but also those universal laws of thought which are the basis of all reasoning, and which, whatever they may be as to their essence, are at least mathematical as to their form.”

George Boole (1815–1864) English mathematician, philosopher and logician

George Boole, " Solution of a Question in the Theory of Probabilities http://books.google.nl/books?id=9xtDAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA32" (30 November 1853) published in The London, Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science‬‎ (January 1854), p. 32
1850s

Mathematics , Question , Universe , Science

“A system designed to protect individual liberty will have no punishments for any group and no privileges. Today, I think inner-city folks and minorities are punished unfairly in the war on drugs.
For instance, blacks make up 14% of those who use drugs, yet 36 percent of those arrested are Blacks and it ends up that 63% of those who finally end up in prison are Blacks. This has to change.
We don’t have to have more courts and more prisons. We need to repeal the whole war on drugs. It isn’t working. We have already spent over $400 billion since the early 1970s, and it is wasted money. Prohibition didn’t work. Prohibition on drugs doesn’t work. So we need to come to our senses. And, absolutely, it’s a disease. We don’t treat alcoholics like this. This is a disease, and we should orient ourselves to this. That is one way you could have equal justice under the law.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

GOP Presidential Forum at Morgan State University http://www.tigerdroppings.com/rant/p/30724045/Stands-on-race-Paul-can-not-deny.aspx, September 27, 2007
2000s, 2006-2009

Money , War , Alcohol , Disease

“Almost all of the social tragedies occurring around the world today are caused by ignoring the basic biological laws of nature … The quicker we humans learn that saving open space and wildlife is critical to our welfare and quality of life, maybe we'll start thinking of doing something about it.”

Jim Fowler (1930–2019) American zoologist

http://www.lindberghfoundation.org/events/past.html

Life , World , Nature , Thinking

“As for principles of law, he should know those which are necessary in the case of buildings having party walls, with regard to water dripping from the eaves, and also the laws about drains, windows, and water supply. And other things of this sort should be known to architects, so that… they may be careful not to leave disputed points for the householders to settle after the works are finished, and so that in drawing up contracts the interests of both employer and contractor may be wisely safe-guarded.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book I, Chapter I, Sec. 10

Water , Drawing

“Remember the rights of the savage, as we call him. Remember that the happiness of his humble home, remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan among the winter snows, are as sacred in the eye of Almighty God as are your own. Remember that He who has united you together as human beings in the same flesh and blood, has bound you by the law of mutual love, that that mutual love is not limited by the shores of this island, is not limited by the boundaries of Christian civilisation, that it passes over the whole surface of the earth, and embraces the meanest along with the greatest in its wide scope.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Speech, Foresters' Hall, Dalkeith, Scotland (26 November 1879) as part of the Midlothian campaign; published in "Mr Gladstone's visit to Mid-Lothian: Meeting at the Foresters' Hall" (27 November 1879), The Scotsman, p. 6; also quoted in Life of Gladstone (1903) by John Morley, II, (p. 595)
1870s

Love , Life , God , Home

“This, then, is the gain of the Good Fight in this war, first, that the nation has attained a living consciousness of its inevitable unity, second, that it has proved its enormous power, and third, that in the terrible struggle it has used that united power for, and not against, equal rights. And the spirit of caste which it has disabled it will now utterly destroy. For the Good Fight is not a crusade against a section or a State, but against caste everywhere in the country. This is now entrenched in the bitter prejudice against the colored race, which is as inhuman and unmanly as the old hatred and contempt of Christendom for the Jews. Lifting their heads from bloody defeat in the field, the wan and wasted States of the South say in terms caste must be maintained, and by every kind of vagrant law and hostile legislation they will try to maintain it.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1860s, The Good Fight (1865)

Hostility , War , Color , Fight

“We have a right to expect that the Negro community will be responsible, will uphold the law, but they have a right to expect that the law will be fair, that the Constitution will be color blind, as Justice Harlan said at the turn of the century.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1963, Civil Rights Address

Justice , Color , Communication

“With the offspring of genius, the law of parturition is reversed; the throes are in the conception, the pleasure in the birth.”

Charles Caleb Colton (1777–1832) British priest and writer

Vol. II; XVII
Lacon (1820)

Pleasure , Birth

“I take the liberty of asserting that there is one valid reason, and only one, for either punishing a man or rewarding him in this world; one reason, which ancient piety could well define: That you may do the will and commandment of God with regard to him; that you may do justice to him. This is your one true aim in respect of him; aim thitherward, with all your heart and all your strength and all your soul, thitherward, and not elsewhither at all! This aim is true, and will carry you to all earthly heights and benefits, and beyond the stars and Heavens. All other aims are purblind, illegitimate, untrue; and will never carry you beyond the shop-counter, nay very soon will prove themselves incapable of maintaining you even there. Find out what the Law of God is with regard to a man; make that your human law, or I say it will be ill with you, and not well!”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Model Prisons (March 1, 1850)

God , World , Justice , Soul

“Eichmann, much less intelligent and without any education to speak of, at least dimly realized that it was not an order but a law which had turned them all into criminals. The distinction between an order and the Führer's word was that the latter's validity was not limited in time and space, which is the outstanding characteristic of the former. This is also the true reason why the Führer's order for the Final Solution was followed by a huge shower of regulations and directives, all drafted by expert lawyers and legal advisors, not by mere administrators; this order, in contrast to ordinary orders, was treated as a law. Needless to add, the resulting legal paraphernalia, far from being a mere symptom of German pedantry and thoroughness, served most effectively to give the whole business its outward appearance of legality.And just as the law in civilized countries assumes that the voice of conscience tells everybody, "Thou shalt not kill," even though man's natural desires and inclinations may at times be murderous, so the law of Hitler's land demanded that the voice of conscience tell everybody: "Thou shalt kill," although the organizers of the massacres knew full well that murder is against the normal desires and inclinations of most people. Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it — the quality of temptation.”

Hannah Arendt book Eichmann in Jerusalem

Source: Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Ch. VIII.

People , Education , Intelligence , Business

“Sharron Angle: I feel that the Second Amendment is the right to keep and bear arms for our citizenry. This not for someone who's in the military. This not for law enforcement. This is for us. And in fact when you read that Constitution and the founding fathers, they intended this to stop tyranny. This is for us when our government becomes tyrannical…
Bill Manders: If we needed it at any time in history, it might be right now.
Sharron Angle: Well it's to defend ourselves. And you know, I'm hoping that we're not getting to Second Amendment remedies. I hope the vote will be the cure for the Harry Reid problems.”

Sharron Angle (1949) Former member of the Nevada Assembly from 1999 to 2007

interview with talk radio host Bill Manders early in senatorial campaign
Sharron Angle Floated '2nd Amendment Remedies' As 'Cure' For 'The Harry Reid Problems'
2010-06-06
The Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/16/sharron-angle-floated-2nd_n_614003.html

Hope , Feeling , History , Problem

“Of course it is true that the public benefit, along with justice, is an objective of the law. And of course laws have value in and of themselves, even bad laws: the value, namely, of securing the law against uncertainty.”

Gustav Radbruch (1878–1949) German politician

"Five Minutes of Legal Philosophy" (1945)

Justice

“Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal.”

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host

"Sir Arthur's Quotations" http://www.clarkefoundation.org/about-sir-arthur/sir-arthurs-quotations/, The Arthur C. Clarke Foundation.
Disputed

Nature

“To be sure, one value comes with every positive-law statute without reference to its content: Any statute is always better than no statute at all, since it at least creates legal certainty. But legal certainty is not the only value that law must effectuate, nor is it the decisive value. Alongside legal certainty, there are two other values: purposiveness and justice. In ranking these values, we assign to last place the purposiveness of the law in serving the public benefit.”

Gustav Radbruch (1878–1949) German politician

"Statutory Lawlessness and Supra-Statutory Law" (1946)

Justice , Decision

“While acknowledging our mutual affection by publicly assuming the relationship of husband and wife, yet in justice to ourselves and a great principle, we deem it a duty to declare that this act on our part implies no sanction of, nor promise of voluntary obedience to such of the present laws of marriage, as refuse to recognize the wife as an independent, rational being, while they confer upon the husband an injurious and unnatural superiority, investing him with legal powers which no honorable man would exercise, and which no man should possess.”

Lucy Stone (1818–1893) American abolitionist and suffragist

Marriage protest (1855)

Marriage , Justice , Exercises , Parting

“The Quran also wants to emphasize that the right of the weak to resist and confront the strong who are oppressing them is part of the natural laws that have been laid down to make humans feel secure in life and in their religious beliefs.”

Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah (1935–2010) Lebanese faqih

The Quran calls on the weak and oppressed to gain strength http://english.bayynat.org/TheHolyQuran/Quran_QuranCalls.htm

Life , Feeling , Nature , Strong

“The works of art, by being publicly exhibited and offered for sale, are becoming articles of trade, following as such the unreasoning laws of markets and fashion; and public and even private patronage is swayed by their tyrannical influence.”

Albert, Prince Consort (1819–1861) husband of Queen Victoria

"Albert, Prince" The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Ed. Elizabeth Knowles. Oxford University Press, 2004. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Accessed on 20 November 2008 http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t115.e51

Art , Fashion

“Hey wait a minute, this isn't a Copyright claim now is it? This looks more like a personal ad! How about checking out some of the local press instead of trying to pick up people in other continents? Actually, being in different countries(even on different continents) means that we don't have the same laws here. You know, in Sweden, it's still legal to do a lot of things. Elks can have sex with eachother without being prosecuted for instance. And people are allowed to copy. It's quite natural, both of them, don't you think?”

Peter Sunde (1978) Swedish activist and computer expert

The Pirate Bay Legal Threats: Prophecy House: Email and Response http://web.archive.org/20060423074547/static.thepiratebay.org/huckabay_resp.txt

People , Sex , Nature , Thinking

“The physicist needs a facility in looking at problems from several points of view. The exact analysis of real physical problems is usually quite complicated, and any particular physical situation may be too complicated to analyze directly by solving the differential equation. But one can still get a very good idea of the behavior of a system if one has some feel for the character of the solution in different circumstances. Ideas such as the field lines, capacitance, resistance, and inductance are, for such purposes, very useful. … On the other hand, none of the heuristic models, such as field lines, is really adequate and accurate for all situations. There is only one precise way of presenting the laws, and that is by means of differential equations. They have the advantage of being fundamental and, so far as we know, precise. If you have learned the differential equations you can always go back to them. There is nothing to unlearn.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

volume II; lecture 2, "Differential Calculus of Vector Fields"; section 2-1, "Understanding physics"; p. 2-1
The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964)

Way , Behavior , Feeling , Idea

“I will never agree to international involvement in this matter. We have more than enough specialists, experts and knowledgeable people in our country to solve our internal issues. This investigation should be internal and indigenous, without violating the laws of the country and I believe in the judicial system and other relevant authorities in this regard. The international community need not worry about matters of state interest”

Maithripala Sirisena (1951) Sri Lankan politician, 7th President of Sri Lanka

Talking to BBC Sinhala Service about a proposed investigation into allegations on war crimes, quoted on Daily Mirror.lk (February 5, 2016), "The international community need not worry about matters of state interest”- President Sirisena" http://www.dailymirror.lk/104990/The-international-community-need-not-worry-about-matters-of-state-interest-President-Sirisena-

People , Communication , Knowledge , Country

“I consider biennial elections as a security that the sober, second thought of the people shall be law.”

Fisher Ames (1758–1808) American politician

Speech on Biennial Elections before the Convention of Massachusetts (January 1788), reported in Seth Ames, John Thornton Kirkland, Works of Fisher Ames with a Selection from His Speeches and Correspondence (1854) p. 7.

People

“Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States. A military force, at the command of Congress, can execute no laws, but such as the people perceive to be just and constitutional; for they will possess the power, and jealousy will instantly inspire the inclination, to resist the execution of a law which appears to them unjust and oppressive.”

Noah Webster (1758–1843) lexicographer, textbook pioneer, English-language spelling reformer, writer, editor and author

An Examination of the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution (1787).

People , Jealousy , Appearance

“The hypostasis of the particular methods of procedure employed by natural science … results in the view that all theoretical differences which rest on historically conditioned antagonisms of interest are to be settles by a “crucial experiment” rather than by struggle and counter-struggle. The harmonious relation of individuals to one another becomes a fact, therefore, that has even more general character than a law of nature.”

Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) German philosopher and sociologist

Source: "The Latest Attack on Metaphysics" (1937), p. 148.

Nature , Science

“Then there's the law that any person found carrying a Swanhook, the same being neither a Swanherd in good standing nor accompanied by two certified Swanherds, or Swannerds (or Swanners, or Swanmasters), of known probity, should cough up thirteen shillings fourpence, three shillings fourpence going to the informer and the rest to the King. This looked like a fine bit of legislation until it developed that you can't collect from such people. They haven't got it. That's why they're out stealing Swans.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

Swan-Upping, Indeed!
How to Attract the Wombat (1949)

People , Personality

“It is the professional duty of the judge to validate the law’s claim to validity, to sacrifice his own sense of the right to the authoritative command of the law, to ask only what is legal and ask not if it is also just.”

Gustav Radbruch (1878–1949) German politician

Rechtsphilosophie (1932)

Sense

“Upon Clifford's death the labour of revision and completion was entrusted to Mr. R. C. Rowe, then Professor of Pure Mathematics at University College, London. …On the sad death of Professor Rowe, in October 1884, I was requested… to take up the task of editing… For the latter half of Chapter III. and for the whole of Chapter IV. …I am alone responsible. Yet whatever there is in them of value I owe to Clifford; whatever is feeble or obscure is my own. …With Chapter V. my task has been by no means light. …Without any notice of mass or force it seemed impossible to close a discussion on motion; something I felt must be added. I have accordingly introduced a few pages on the laws of motion. I have since found that Clifford intended to write a concluding chapter on mass. How to express the laws of motion in a form of which Clifford would have approved was indeed an insoluble riddle to me, because I was unaware of his having written anything on the subject. I have accordingly expressed, although with great hesitation, my own views on the subject; these may be concisely described as a strong desire to see the terms matter and force, together with the ideas associated with them, entirely removed from scientific terminology—to reduce, in fact, all dynamic to kinematic. I should hardly have ventured to put forward these views had I not recently discovered that they have (allowing for certain minor differences) the weighty authority of Professor Mach, of Prag. But since writing these pages I have also been referred to a discourse delivered by Clifford at the Royal Institution in 1873, some account of which appeared in Nature, June 10, 1880. Therein it is stated that 'no mathematician can give any meaning to the language about matter, force, inertia used in current text-books of mechanics.”

William Kingdon Clifford (1845–1879) English mathematician and philosopher

This fragmentary account of the discourse undoubtedly proves that Clifford held on the categories of matter and force as clear and original ideas as on all subjects of which he has treated; only, alas! they have not been preserved.
Preface by Karl Pearson
The Common Sense of the Exact Sciences (1885)

Death , Books , Sadness , Mathematics

“Granting, I say that competition has hitherto been the universal law, the last word, of nature, still if only one man should stand up and say, "It shall be so no more," if he should say, "It is not the last word of my nature, and my acts and life declare that it is not," then that so-called law would be at an end.”

Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) British poet and academic

England's Ideal: And Other Papers on Social Subjects (1887) p. 54

Life , Nature , Universe

“Obeying an inalienable law, things grew, growing riotous and strange in their impulse for growth.”

Brian W. Aldiss book Hothouse

Source: Hothouse (1962), Chapter 1 (first line)

“Is not selfishness, or systematic plunder, or political knavery as odious as the blunders of democracy? We must choose between the party which governs upon an exclusive or monopoly principle, and the people who seek, though blindly perhaps, the good of the vast majority…I think the scattered elements may yet be rallied round the question of the corn laws. It appears to me that a moral and even a religious spirit may be infused into that topic, and if agitated in the same manner that the question of slavery has been, it will be irresistible.”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Letter to F. Cobden (5 October 1838), quoted in John Morley, The Life of Richard Cobden (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1905), p. 126.
1830s

People , Democracy , Question , Thinking

“T' abhor the makers, and their laws approve,
Is to hate traitors and the treason love.”

John Dryden book The Hind and the Panther

Pt. III, lines 706–707.
The Hind and the Panther (1687)

Love , Hate

“Once again, my family and I find ourselves being assaulted by the obscenity that is Mumia Abu-Jamal. On Sunday October 5th, my husband's killer will once again air his voice from what masquerades as a prison, and spew his thoughts and ideas at another college commencement. Mumia Abu-Jamal will be heard and honored as a victim and a hero by a pack of adolescent sycophants at Goddard College in Vermont. Despite the fact that 33 years ago, he loaded his gun with special high-velocity ammunition designed to kill in the most devastating fashion, then used that gun to rip my husband's freedom from him--today, Mumia Abu-Jamal will be lauded as a freedom fighter. Undoubtedly the administrators at Goddard who first accepted, then enthusiastically supported Abu-Jamal as their speaker will be moved by his "important message" when, if one distills that message to its basic meaning, it amounts to nothing more than the same worn out hatred for this country and everyone in law enforcement that Mumia Abu-Jamal has harbored his entire life. Many at Goddard College have said that this is a matter of Abu-Jamal's First Amendment right to speak and be heard. What a convenient way to dodge their responsibility to take a moral position on this situation. This is not a matter of First Amendment rights -- it's a matter of right and wrong. Across the country, people have been voicing their disgust with the wrong that the college is about to commit by allowing a convicted cop-killer to speak to them. Is this the message to be heard? How could they allow him to speak when Danny no longer has a voice? It is my opinion that all murderers should forfeit their right to free speech when they take the life of an innocent person. I have repeatedly seen college administrators deny conservative and religious speakers access to their campuses when even the tiniest minority feel their message is in some way offensive. What could be more offensive than having a person who violently took the life of another imparting his "unique perspective" on your students? Let's be honest. The instructors, administrators and graduates at Goddard College embrace having this killer as their commencement speaker not despite the fact that he brutally murdered a cop, but because he brutally murdered a cop. Otherwise, like so many other speakers that have been denied access to college campuses across the country, Goddard's administration would have lived up to their moral responsibility and pulled the plug on this travesty long ago. Shame on Goddard College and all associated with that school for choosing to honor an arrogant remorseless killer as their commencement speaker. Unfortunately, this is something that I am certain they will be proud of for the rest of their lives.”

Mumia Abu-Jamal (1954) Prisoner, Journalist, Broadcaster, Author, Activist

Statement http://6abc.com/news/mumia-abu-jamal-speech-met-with-vigil-for-slain-officer/337357/ by Maureen Faulkner, widow of Daniel Faulkner, upon Abu-Jamal's delivering the Commencement Address at Goddard College in 2014
About

Life , People , School , Family

“It has appeared that from the inevitable laws of our nature, some human beings must suffer from want. These are the unhappy persons who, in the great lottery of life, have drawn a blank.”

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) British political economist

Source: An Essay on The Principle of Population (First Edition 1798, unrevised), Chapter X, paragraph 29, lines 12-15

Life , Nature , Suffering , Appearance

“Conservatives have, on the whole, accepted nationality as a sphere of local duties and loyalties, defining an inheritance and a community that has a right to pass on its values from generation to generation. The nation may indeed be the best that we now have, by way of a society linking the dead to the unborn, in the manner extolled by Burke. And for this very reason it arouses the hostility of liberals, who are constantly searching for a place outside loyalty and obedience, from which all human claims can be judged. Hence, in the conflicts of our times, while conservatives leap to the defense of the nation and its interests, wishing to maintain its integrity and to enforce its law, liberals advocate transnational initiatives, international courts, and doctrines of universal rights, all of which, they believe, should stand in judgment over the nation and hold it to account.”

Roger Scruton (1944–2020) English philosopher

"The Limits of Liberty," http://spectator.org/42528_back-basics/ The American Spectator (December 2008).

Hostility , Way , Search , Communication

“The Courts must declare the sense of the law; and if they should be disposed to exercise will instead of judgement; the consequences would be the substitution of their pleasure for that of the legislative body.”

Alexander Hamilton Federalist Papers

No. 78
The Federalist Papers (1787–1788)

Pleasure , Exercises , Sense

“Children learn the fundamental principles of natural law at a very early age. Thus they very early understand that one child must not, without just cause, strike or otherwise hurt, another; that one child must not assume any arbitrary control or domination over another; that one child must not, either by force, deceit, or stealth, obtain possession of anything that belongs to another; that if one child commits any of these wrongs against another, it is not only the right of the injured child to resist, and, if need be, punish the wrongdoer, and compel him to make reparation, but that it is also the right, and the moral duty, of all other children, and all other persons, to assist the injured party in defending his rights, and redressing his wrongs. These are fundamental principles of natural law, which govern the most important transactions of man with man. Yet children learn them earlier than they learn that three and three are six, or five and five ten. Their childish plays, even, could not be carried on without a constant regard to them; and it is equally impossible for persons of any age to live together in peace on any other conditions.

It would be no extravagance to say that, in most cases, if not in all, mankind at large, young and old, learn this natural law long before they have learned the meanings of the words by which we describe it. In truth, it would be impossible to make them understand the real meanings of the words, if they did not understand the nature of the thing itself. To make them understand the meanings of the words justice and injustice before knowing the nature of the things themselves, would be as impossible as it would be to make them understand the meanings of the words heat and cold, wet and dry, light and darkness, white and black, one and two, before knowing the nature of the things themselves. Men necessarily must know sentiments and ideas, no less than material things, before they can know the meanings of the words by which we describe them.”

Lysander Spooner (1808–1887) Anarchist, Entrepreneur, Abolitionist

Section IV, p. 9–10
Natural Law; or The Science of Justice (1882), Chapter I. The Science of Justice.

Men , Children , Truth , Age

“Neither Watt's steam engine nor Whitney's standardized parts really started the Industrial Revolution, although each has been awarded that claim, in the past. The real start was the awakening of scientific and technological thoughts during the Renaissance, with the idea that the lawful behavior of nature can be understood, analyzed, and manipulated to accomplish useful ends. That idea itself, alone, was not enough, however, for not until the creation and evolution of blueprints was it possible to express exactly how power and parts were to be combined for each specific task at hand.”

Douglas T. Ross (1929–2007) American computer scientist

Source: Structured analysis (SA): A language for communicating ideas (1977), p. 16.

Behavior , Idea , Nature , Past

“A piece of knowledge about boat-building, about whose correctness Crusoe has no doubts at all, will not be seen as a hunch and will be valued according to Menger's Law. It may be said that Crusoe is well aware that he possesses this kind of information; he will deploy and value it in the same way as he may be imagined to deploy and value other resources he believes are definitely at his disposal. But concerning Crusoe's hunches and his visions in the face of a changing, uncertain environment, it cannot be said at all that Crusoe knows he has a hunch or a vision of the future. He does not act by deliberately utilizing his hunch about the future; instead, he finds that his actions reflect his hunches…In other words, it turns out, the essence of entrepreneurial vision, and what sets it apart from knowledge as a resource, is reflected in Crusoe's lack of self-consciousness concerning it…Crusoe may…gradually come to be aware of his vision. When he does, that vision ceases to be entrepreneurial and comes to be a resource. Moreover, Crusoe's realization that he possesses this definite information resource may itself be entrepreneurial. As soon as he 'knows' that he possesses an item of knowledge, that item ceases to correspond to entrepreneurial vision; instead, as with all resources, it is Crusoe's belief that he has the resources at his disposal that may now constitute his entrepreneurial hunch.”

Israel Kirzner (1930) American economist

Israel Kirzner, (1979: 168-169); as cited in: " Israel Kirzner's Entrepreneurship http://www.constitution.org/pd/gunning/subjecti/workpape/kirz_ent.pdf" by the Constitution Society, May 31, 2004

Way , Imagination , Knowledge , Change

“Riots were also the most virulent symptoms to date of another, and in some ways graver, national disorder — the decline in respect for public authority and the rule of law in America. Far from being a great society, our is becoming a lawless society.”

Richard Nixon (1913–1994) 37th President of the United States of America

1960s, What Has Happened to America? (1967)

Way

“We are not talking here about a federal law prohibiting the States from regulating bubble-gum advertising, or even the construction of nuclear plants. We are talking about a federal law going to the core of state sovereignty: the power to exclude. […] The Court opinion’s looming specter of inutterable horror—‘[i]f [Section] 3 of the Arizona statute were valid, every State could give itself independent authority to prosecute federal registration violations’—seems to me not so horrible and even less looming. But there has come to pass, and is with us today, the specter that Arizona and the States that support it predicted: A Federal Government that does not want to enforce the immigration laws as written, and leaves the States’ borders unprotected against immigrants whom those laws would exclude. So the issue is a stark one. Are the sovereign States at the mercy of the Federal Executive’s refusal to enforce the Nation’s immigration laws? […] Arizona bears the brunt of the country’s illegal immigration problem. Its citizens feel themselves under siege by large numbers of illegal immigrants who invade their property, strain their social services, and even place their lives in jeopardy. Federal officials have been unable to remedy the problem, and indeed have recently shown that they are unwilling to do so. […] Arizona has moved to protect its sovereignty—not in contradiction of federal law, but in complete compliance with it. The laws under challenge here do not extend or revise federal immigration restrictions, but merely enforce those restrictions more effectively. If securing its territory in this fashion is not within the power of Arizona, we should cease referring to it as a sovereign State.”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Concurring in part and dissenting in part, Arizona v. United States (2012) : 567 U.S. ___ (2012); decided June 25, 2012.
2010s

Feeling , Fashion , Support , Problem

“We like to say law, order, freedom — pick one, amigo.”

Mike Murphy (political consultant) (1962) American political consultant

As quoted in "Debriefing Mike Murphy" https://www.weeklystandard.com/matt-labash/debriefing-mike-murphy (18 March 2016), by Matt Labash, The Weekly Standard
2010s

Freedom

“… the fact is that while we have become the most religious of any of the predominantly Christian first world nations, (due to repeated surges in rural revivalism) the US in its infancy was once the most secular government in history. The original colonies were primarily peopled by refugees fleeing religious persecution in other countries. But almost upon arrival, the Puritans only continued that practice against native Shaman, then against Quakers, and even each other –over religious differences. Catholics to the South were even worse! The founding fathers however were largely Deists, the least devout form of theism. They were brilliant men who knew better than to let religion rule over law because theocracy has in all instances almost automatically violated human rights and it inevitably always does. Consequently, the irreligious and non-Christian framers of the American Constitution produced the first government ever to grant all its citizens the right to religious freedom, and they did so by forbidding the government from sponsoring or promoting one religion over any other. Because it is not possible to have freedom of religion without having freedom from religion.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"5th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzmbnxtnMB4, Youtube (January 14, 2008)
Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Men , People , World , Religion

“What gave transcendent importance to the aggressiveness of power was the fact that its natural prey, its necessary victim, was liberty, or law, or right.”

Bernard Bailyn book The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

Source: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), Chapter III, POWER AND LIBERTY A THEORY OF POLITICS, p. 57.

Nature