“Those who believe that… detailed rules originate in a certain cause, are as far from the truth as those who assume that the whole law is useless.”

In Praise of Marriage (1519), in Erasmus on Women (1996) Erika Rummel <!-- De Conscribendis Epistolas -->
Context: I have no patience with those who say that sexual excitement is shameful and that venereal stimuli have their origin not in nature, but in sin. Nothing is so far from the truth. As if marriage, whose function cannot be fulfilled without these incitements, did not rise above blame. In other living creatures, where do these incitements come from? From nature or from sin? From nature, of course. It must borne in mind that in the apetites of the body there is very little difference between man and other living creatures. Finally, we defile by our imagination what of its own nature is fair and holy. If we were willing to evaluate things not according to the opinion of the crowd, but according to nature itself, how is it less repulsive to eat, chew, digest, evacuate, and sleep after the fashion of dumb animals, than to enjoy lawful and permitted carnal relations?

Source: Books, Beyond Order (2021), p. 85

19th World Vegetarian Congress 1967

Speech to the Fiji Law Society, 2 July 2005.

Ainsi soit-il; ou, Les Jeux sont faits
So be it; or, The chips are down
Gallimard
1952
174
Original: (fr) Croyez ceux qui cherchent la vérité, doutez de ceux qui la trouvent; doutez de tout, mais ne doutez pas de vous-même.

Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwhacking of America, 2003
2003

Pearls of Wisdom

Variant: Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.