“[W]e are not so much concerned this evening with the dead letter of edicts and of statutes as with the living thoughts of men.”

p, 125
The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877)

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John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton112

British politician and historian 1834–1902

Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000) Philosopher

Hartshorne's main reflection on a full 100 years of life.
"A hundred years of thinking about God" (1998)

“The living, he thought, should never be used to serve the purposes of the dead. But the dead—he glanced at Bruce, the empty shape beside him — should, if possible, serve the purposes of the living.
That, he reasoned, is the law of life.
And the dead, if they could feel, might feel better doing so.
The dead, Mike thought, who can still see, even if they can't understand: they are our camera.”

Philip K. Dick book A Scanner Darkly

Source: A Scanner Darkly (1977), Chapter 15 (p. 266)

“On one occasion Aristotle was asked how much educated men were superior to those uneducated: "As much," said he, "as the living are to the dead."”

Diogenes Laërtius (180–240) biographer of ancient Greek philosophers

Aristotle, 9.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 5: The Peripatetics

“I would rather, much rather, be illegitimate according to the statutes of men, than illegitimate according to the unchanging law of Nature.”

Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) American anarchist writer and feminist

Sex Slavery (1890)
Context: O height and depth of purity, which fears so much that the children will not know who their fathers are, because, forsooth, they must rely upon their mother's word instead of the hired certification of some priest of the Church, or the Law! I wonder if the children would be improved to know what their fathers have done. I would rather, much rather, not know who my father was than know he had been a tyrant to my mother. I would rather, much rather, be illegitimate according to the statutes of men, than illegitimate according to the unchanging law of Nature.