“The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself.”

— Charles Dickens , book Bleak House

Source: Bleak House (1852-1853), Ch. 39

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Charles Dickens 116

English writer and social critic and a Journalist 1812–1870

Walter Russell (1871–1963) American philosopher

The Man who Tapped the Secrets of the Universe

“A culture of discipline is not a principle of business, it is a principle of greatness.”

James C. Collins (1958) American business consultant and writer

Source: Good To Great And The Social Sectors, 2005, p. 1

“When... a simple principle has been discovered... then this principle or law itself generally leads to the discovery of a still wider range of hitherto unregarded phenomena... Every great advance of science opens our eyes to facts which we had failed before to observe, and makes new demands...”

Karl Pearson book The Grammar of Science

Introductory
The Grammar of Science (1900)

“The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.”

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German philosopher

Source: The Works of Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life and Other Essays

“The underlying principle of Balance in Nature’s One Law is equality of interchange between the pairs of opposites in any transaction in Nature. That principle must eventually be observed by big business, and the go-getter salesman who selfishly thinks that the sale he makes is the only thing that counts is not giving equally for what he takes.”

Walter Russell (1871–1963) American philosopher

The Man who Tapped the Secrets of the Universe

“To Donham, the case study stood squarely in the legal and cultural tradition of Anglo-American thought. Unlike French or Spanish law. Donham emphasized, English law was grounded on the doctrine of stare decisis, in which the written case decisions of the past shape, and instantiate, the law. Just as the recording of cases allowed English common law to break the arbitrariness of local law. Donham argued in 1925, business needed to universalize its procedures by itself adopting the case system. The chaos of local law that ruled in England before the common law. Donham contended, "is exactly the same situation that we have [in the world of business] where practically every large corporation is tightly hound by traditions which are precedents in its particular narrow field and narrow held only The recording of decisions from industry to industry [enables] us to start from facts and draw inferences from those facts; [it] will introduce principle… in the field of business to such an extent that it will control executive action in the field where executive action is haphazard or unprincipled or bound by narrow, instead of broad precedent and decision"”

Peter Galison (1955) American physicist

W. Donham, transcript of talk to the Association of Coll. School of Business Committee Reports and Other Literature, 5-7 May 1925. Harvard Business School, box 17, folder 10. 62
Source: Image and Logic, 1997, p. 57, footnote 66

“It will never make any difference to a hero what the laws are. His greatness will shine and accomplish itself unto the end, whether they second him or not.”

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

1840s, The Conservative (1841)
Context: It will never make any difference to a hero what the laws are. His greatness will shine and accomplish itself unto the end, whether they second him or not. If he have earned his bread by drudgery, and in the narrow and crooked ways which were all an evil law had left him, he will make it at least honorable by his expenditure. Of the past he will take no heed; for its wrongs he will not hold himself responsible: he will say, All the meanness of my progenitors shall not bereave me of the power to make this hour and company fair and fortunate. Whatsoever streams of power and commodity flow to me, shall of me acquire healing virtue, and become fountains of safety. Cannot I too descend a Redeemer into nature? Whosoever hereafter shall name my name, shall not record a malefactor, but a benefactor in the earth. If there be power in good intention, in fidelity, and in toil, the north wind shall be purer, the stars in heaven shall glow with a kindlier beam, that I have lived. I am primarily engaged to myself to be a public servant of all the gods, to demonstrate to all men that there is intelligence and good will at the heart of things, and ever higher and yet higher leadings. These are my engagements; how can your law further or hinder me in what I shall do to men? On the other hand, these dispositions establish their relations to me. Wherever there is worth, I shall be greeted. Wherever there are men, are the objects of my study and love. Sooner of later all men will be my friends, and will testify in all methods the energy of their regard. I cannot thank your law for my protection. I protect it. It is not in its power to protect me. It is my business to make myself revered. I depend on my honor, my labor, and my dispositions for my place in the affections of mankind, and not on any conventions or parchments of yours.

“Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A Prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Alledgedly from a speech to the Illinois House of Representatives (18 December 1840) its called "a remarkable piece of spurious Lincolniana" by Merrill D. Peterson: Lincoln in American Memory. Oxford UP 1995, books.google https://books.google.de/books?id=EADk9ZIMJXEC&q=prohibitory#v=page. Cf.Spurious archive.org https://archive.org/details/abrahamlincolnqulinc_41 and Harry Miller Lydenberg: Lincoln and Prohibition, Blazes on a Zigzag Trail. Proceedings Of The American Antiquarian Society, No. 1/1952 pdf http://www.americanantiquarian.org/proceedings/44807229.pdf.
Misattributed

“The essential principle of totalitarianism is to make laws that are impossible to obey.”

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

Source: god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“The principle of Parliamentary sovereignty means neither more nor less than this, namely, that Parliament thus defined has, under the English constitution, the right to make or unmake any law whatever; and, further, that no person or body is recognised by the law of England as having a right to override or set aside the legislation of Parliament.”

A. V. Dicey (1835–1922) British jurist and constitutional theorist

Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution [Eighth Edition, 1915] (LibertyClassics, 1982), pp. 3-4.

“The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself.”

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