“There is but one law for all, namely, that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity — the law of nature, and of nations.”
28 May 1794
On the Impeachment of Warren Hastings (1788-1794)
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Edmund Burke270
Anglo-Irish statesman 1729–1797Related quotes
“All human laws are nourished by one divine law.”
Heraclitus (-535) pre-Socratic Greek philosopher
Fragment 114
Numbered fragments
“For there is but one essential justice which cements society, and one law which establishes this justice. This law is right reason, which is the true rule of all commandments and prohibitions.”
Est enim unum ius quo deuincta est hominum societas et quod lex constituit una, quae lex est recta ratio imperandi atque prohibendi. Quam qui ignorat, is est iniustus, siue est illa scripta uspiam siue nusquam.
Marcus Tullius Cicero book De Legibus
Book I, section 42; Translation by C.D. Yonge)
De Legibus (On the Laws)
Context: For there is but one essential justice which cements society, and one law which establishes this justice. This law is right reason, which is the true rule of all commandments and prohibitions. Whoever neglects this law, whether written or unwritten, is necessarily unjust and wicked.
Stephen Robson (1951) Bishop of Dunkeld
Bishop Stephen Robson’s homily https://www.dunkelddiocese.co.uk/chrism-mass-st-andrews-cathedral-2019/ (17 April 2019)
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement
1960s, (1963)
William Greenough Thayer Shedd (1820–1894) American theologian
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 267.
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) Romanian politician
For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Politics
Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)
1960s, Memorial Day speech (1963)
Context: The law cannot save those who deny it but neither can the law serve any who do not use it. The history of injustice and inequality is a history of disuse of the law. Law has not failed — and is not failing. We as a nation have failed ourselves by not trusting the law and by not using the law to gain sooner the ends of justice which law alone serves. If the white over-estimates what he has done for the Negro without the law, the Negro may under-estimate what he is doing and can do for himself with the law.
