
“An act against the Constitution is void; an act against natural equity is void.”
Argument Against the Writs of Assistance (1761)
Vol. 1m bk. 1, ch. 3
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)
“An act against the Constitution is void; an act against natural equity is void.”
Argument Against the Writs of Assistance (1761)
“They too, like so much that to the common eye seems solid, may melt into air, into thin air.”
Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 69, Farewell to Nemi
Context: In the ages to come man may be able to predict, perhaps even to control, the wayward courses of the winds and the clouds, but hardly will his puny hands have strength to speed afresh our slackening planet in its orbit or rekindle the dying fire of the sun. Yet the philosopher who trembles at the idea of such distant catastrophes may console himself by reflecting that these gloomy apprehensions, like the earth and the sun themselves, are only parts of that unsubstantial world which thought has conjured up out of the void, and that the phantoms which the subtle enchantress has evoked to-day she may ban to-morrow. They too, like so much that to the common eye seems solid, may melt into air, into thin air.
2000s, 2003, Mission Accomplished (May 2003)
Source: 1930s- 1950s, The Future of Industrial Man (1942), p. 122
Source: Reason: The Only Oracle Of Man (1784), Ch. II Section III - Of The Eternity and Infinitude of Divine Providence
“It was one of those perfect autumn days so common in stories and so rare in the real world.”
Source: The Name of the Wind (2007), Chapter 2, “A Beautiful Day” (p. 19)
Introduction
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)
Context: Whatever concept one may hold, from a metaphysical point of view, concerning the freedom of the will, certainly its appearances, which are human actions, like every other natural event are determined by universal laws. However obscure their causes, history, which is concerned with narrating these appearances, permits us to hope that if we attend to the play of freedom of the human will in the large, we may be able to discern a regular movement in it, and that what seems complex and chaotic in the single individual may be seen from the standpoint of the human race as a whole to be a steady and progressive though slow evolution of its original endowment.
Interview in the documentary-film The Game Changers by Louie Psihoyos (2018).