Quotes about ruling
page 14

George William Russell photo
Bill Whittle photo

“[The Democratic Party] is a criminal enterprise that would rather rule over the ruins than be part of governing a happy and successful Republic.”

Bill Whittle (1959) author, director, screenwriter, editor

Bill Whittle's Keynote speech https://vimeo.com/145285384 at the David Horowitz Freedom Center's 2015 Restoration Weekend on Nov. 6, 2015.
2010s

Sherilyn Fenn photo

“The world has certain rules — Hollywood has certain rules — but it doesn't mean you have to play by them, and I don't, or I'd be a miserable person.”

Sherilyn Fenn (1965) American actress

Sherilyn Fenn, quoted in "Fenn Fatale", by Mike Bygrave. Sky Magazine (UK). July 1992. p. 6-10.

P.G. Wodehouse photo
Alex Salmond photo
James Connolly photo
Henry Adams photo
William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham photo

“When then, my Lords, are all the generous efforts of our ancestors, are all those glorious contentions, by which they meant to secure themselves, and to transmit to their posterity, a known law, a certain rule of living, reduced to this conclusion, that instead of the arbitrary power of a King, we must submit to the arbitrary power of a House of Commons? If this be true, what benefit do we derive from the exchange? Tyranny, my Lords, is detestable in every shape; but in none is it so formidable as where it is assumed and exercised by a number of tyrants. But, my Lords, this is not the fact, this is not the constitution; we have a law of Parliament, we have a code in which every honest man may find it. We have Magna Charta, we have the Statute-book, and we have the Bill of Rights…It is to your ancestors, my Lords, it is to the English barons that we are indebted for the laws and constitution we possess. Their virtues were rude and uncultivated, but they were great and sincere…I think that history has not done justice to their conduct, when they obtained from their Sovereign that great acknowledgment of national rights contained in Magna Charta: they did not confine it to themselves alone, but delivered it as a common blessing to the whole people…A breach has been made in the constitution—the battlements are dismantled—the citadel is open to the first invader—the walls totter—the place is no longer tenable.—What then remains for us but to stand foremost in the breach, to repair it, or to perish in it?…let us consider which we ought to respect most—the representative or the collective body of the people. My Lords, five hundred gentlemen are not ten millions; and, if we must have a contention, let us take care to have the English nation on our side. If this question be given up, the freeholders of England are reduced to a condition baser than the peasantry of Poland…Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it; and this I know, my Lords, that where law ends, there tyranny begins.”

William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham (1708–1778) British politician

Speech in the House of Lords on John Wilkes (9 January 1770), quoted in William Pitt, The Speeches of the Right Honourable the Earl of Chatham in the Houses of Lords and Commons: With a Biographical Memoir and Introductions and Explanatory Notes to the Speeches (London: Aylott & Jones, 1848), pp. 90-4.

Simon Stevin photo
Catherine the Great photo
Tawakkol Karman photo
Edward Carpenter photo
George W. Bush photo

“In order to win this war, we need to understand that the terrorists and extremists are opportunists. They will grab onto any cause to incite hatred and to justify the killing of innocent men, women and children. If we weren't in Iraq, they would be using our relationship and friendship with Israel as a reason to recruit, or the Crusades, or cartoons as a reason to commit murder. They recruit based upon lies and excuses. And they murder because of their raw desire for power. They hope to impose their dominion over the broader Middle East and establish a radical Islamic empire where millions are ruled according to their hateful ideology. We know this because al-Qaeda has told us. The terrorist Zawahiri, number two man in the al-Qaeda team, al-Qaeda network, he said, we'll proceed with several incremental goals. The first stage is to expel the Americans from Iraq; the second stage is to establish an Islamic authority, then develop it and support it until it achieves the level of caliphate; the third stage, extend the jihad wave to secular countries neighboring Iraq; and the fourth stage, the clash with Israel. This is the words of the enemy. The President of the United States and the Congress must listen carefully to what the enemy says in order to be able to protect you. It makes sense for us to take their words seriously if our most important job is the security of the United States. Mister Zawahiri has laid out their plan. That's why they attacked us on September the 11th. That's why they fight us in Iraq today. And that is why they must be defeated.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

As quoted in "FLASHBACK 2006: Media Elites Slam Bush For Predicting Rise Of Islamic Caliphate In Iraq" http://dailycaller.com/2016/05/24/flashback-2006-media-elites-slam-bush-for-predicting-rise-of-islamic-caliphate-in-iraq/ (24 May 2016), The Daily Caller
2000s, 2006, Remarks at Bob Riley for Governor Luncheon (2006)

C. A. R. Hoare photo
Gregory Benford photo

“(Crank theories) always violated the first rule of a scientific model: they were uncheckable.”

Source: Timescape (1980), Chapter 17 (p. 235)

Roger Scruton photo
Roger Ebert photo
Charles James Fox photo
Clement Attlee photo
Howard Bloom photo

“Remember a networked learning machine's most basic rule: strengthen the connections to those who succeed, weaken them to those who fail.”

Howard Bloom (1943) American publicist and author

Source: Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000), Ch.9 The Conformity Police

Émile Durkheim photo
Oscar Niemeyer photo
Diodorus Siculus photo
Annie Besant photo
Harry Truman photo
Uhuru Kenyatta photo
Nicholas Murray Butler photo

“The moral ideal has disappeared in all that has to do with international relations. The gain-seeking impulse supported by brute force has taken its place, and so far as the surface of things is concerned human civilization has gone back a full thousand years. Inconceivable though it be, we are brought face to face in this twentieth century with governments of peoples once great and highly civilized, whose word now means absolutely nothing. A pledge is something not to be kept, but to be broken. Cruelty and national lust have displaced human feeling and friendly international co-operation. Human life has no value, and the savings of generations are wasted month by month and almost day by day in mad attempts to dominate the whole world in pursuit of gain.
How has all this been possible? What has happened to the teachings and inspiring leadership of the great prophets and apostles of the mind, who for nearly three thousand years have been holding before mankind a vision of the moral ideal supported by intellectual power? What has become of the influence and guidance of the great religions Christian, Moslem, Hebrew, Buddhist with their counsels of peace and good-will, or of those of Plato and of Aristotle, of St. Augustine and of St. Thomas Aquinas, and of the outstanding captains of the mind Spanish, Italian, French, English, German who have for hundreds of years occupied the highest place in the citadel of human fame? The answer to these questions is not easy. Indeed, it sometimes seems impossible.
Are we, then, of this twentieth century and of this still free and independent land to lose heart and to yield to the despair which is becoming so widespread in countries other than ours? Not for one moment will we yield our faith or our courage! We may well repeat once more the words of Abraham Lincoln: "Most governments have been based on the denial of the equal rights of men, ours began by affirming those rights. We made the experiment, and the fruit is before us. Look at it think of it!"
However dark the skies may seem now, however violent and apparently irresistible are the savage attacks being made with barbarous brutality upon innocent women and children and non-combatant men, upon hospitals and institutions for the care of the aged and dependent, upon cathedrals and churches, upon libraries and galleries of the world s art, upon classic monuments which record the architectural achievements of centuries we must not despair. Our spirit of faith in the ultimate rule of the moral ideal and in the permanent establishment of liberty of thought, of speech, of worship and of government will not, and must not, be permitted to weaken or to lose control of our mind and our action.”

Nicholas Murray Butler (1862–1947) American philosopher, diplomat, and educator

Liberty-Equality-Fraternity (1942)

Frederick Douglass photo

“Although I cannot accuse myself of being remarkably unstable, I do not pretend that I have never altered my opinion both in respect to men and things. Indeed, I have been very much modified both in feeling and opinion within the last fourteen years. When I escaped from slavery, and was introduced to the Garrisonians, I adopted very many of their opinions, and defended them just as long as I deemed them true. I was young, had read but little, and naturally took some things on trust. Subsequent experience and reading have led me to examine for myself. This had brought me to other conclusions. When I was a child, I thought and spoke as a child. But the question is not as to what were my opinions fourteen years ago, but what they are now. If I am right now, it really does not matter what I was fourteen years ago. My position now is one of reform, not of revolution. I would act for the abolition of slavery through the Government — not over its ruins. If slaveholders have ruled the American Government for the last fifty years, let the anti-slavery men rule the nation for the next fifty years. If the South has made the Constitution bend to the purposes of slavery, let the North now make that instrument bend to the cause of freedom and justice. If 350,000 slaveholders have, by devoting their energies to that single end, been able to make slavery the vital and animating spirit of the American Confederacy for the last 72 years, now let the freemen of the North, who have the power in their own hands, and who can make the American Government just what they think fit, resolve to blot out for ever the foul and haggard crime, which is the blight and mildew, the curse and the disgrace of the whole United States.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1860s, The Constitution of the United States: Is It Pro-Slavery or Anti-Slavery? (1860)

Angela Davis photo
Brian Leiter photo
John Paul Jones photo
François de La Rochefoucauld photo

“The passions are the only advocates which always persuade. They are a natural art, the rules of which are infallible; and the simplest man with passion will be more persuasive than the most eloquent without.”

Les passions sont les seuls orateurs qui persuadent toujours. Elles sont comme un art de la nature dont les règles sont infaillibles; et l'homme le plus simple qui a de la passion persuade mieux que le plus éloquent qui n'en a point.
Variant translation: The passions are the only orators who always persuade. They are like a natural art, of which the rules are unfailing; and the simplest man who has passion will be more persuasive than the most eloquent man who has none.
Maxim 8.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)

Gary Gygax photo
Thomas Jackson photo

“The only true rule for cavalry is to follow the enemy as long as he retreats.”

Thomas Jackson (1824–1863) Confederate general

Statement to Colonel Thomas T. Munford (13 June 1862); as quoted in Stonewall Jackson and the American Civil War (1904) by George Francis Robert Henderson http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/12233 Vol. I, Ch. XI p. 392

Gottfried Feder photo
Karl G. Maeser photo

“No righteous rules, however rigid, are too stringent for me; I will live above them.”

Karl G. Maeser (1828–1901) prominent Utah educator and a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Sentence-Sermons from Brigham Young University Quarterly quoted in The Latter-Day Saints' Millenial Star, Vol. 70 https://books.google.com/books?id=eItJAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA452&lpg=PA452&dq=He+that+cheats+another+is+a+knave;+but+he+that+cheats+himself+is+a+fool.&source=bl&ots=WBAQiPjQX6&sig=WLEdKN2_kXPXj8jZALKCp2dguaQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjXmNeF_7HMAhUH42MKHdySDgsQ6AEILzAE#v=onepage&q=fool&f=false

Paul Karl Feyerabend photo
Felix Frankfurter photo

“For the highest exercise of judicial duty is to subordinate one's personal pulls and one's private views to the law of which we are all guaradians - those impersonal convictions that made a society a civilized community, and not the victims of personal rule.”

Felix Frankfurter (1882–1965) American judge

A Heritage For All Who Love The Law 51 ABAJ 330 (1965); quoted by United States Senator Howell Heflin during the confirmation debate for Justice David Souter, on September 24, 1990, S13540.
Other writings

John Ralston Saul photo
Hillary Clinton photo
Alex Salmond photo
Paul Gauguin photo

“My Dear Mr. Pissarro; - I accept with pleasure the invitation that you and Mr. Degas were kind enough to extend to me. And naturally in that case I shall abide by all the rules that govern your Societe. Based on this decision, I also have the membership dues available. I will probably see you at Miss Latouche's and we will talk about this.”

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist artist

Quote from a short letter of Gauguin, 3 April 1879, to French artist to Pissarro; as cited on 'Paul Gauguin Autograph Letter Signed to Camille Pissarro' - Nade D. Sanders http://natedsanders.com/paul_gauguin_autograph_letter_signed_to_camille_pi-lot13463.aspx
Gauguin accepted membership in the Societe Anonyme Cooperative des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs, formed in 1873 by Pissarro, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley for the purpose of exhibiting their artwork independently
1870s - 1880s

Edward Jenks photo

“The process of specialization tends, almost inevitably, to narrow the sources from which the rules of any science are drawn; and English law is no exception from this rule.”

Edward Jenks (1861–1939) British legal scholar

Source: A Short History Of The English Law (First Edition) (1912), Chapter XIII, Modern Authorities And The Legal Profession, p. 185

Gary Gygax photo
John Wallis photo

“Let as many Numbers, as you please, be proposed to be Combined: Suppose Five, which we will call a b c d e. Put, in so many Lines, Numbers, in duple proportion, beginning with 1. The Sum (31) is the Number of Sumptions, or Elections; wherein, one or more of them, may several ways be taken. Hence subduct (5) the Number of the Numbers proposed; because each of them may once be taken singly. And the Remainder (26) shews how many ways they may be taken in Combination; (namely, Two or more at once.) And, consequently, how many Products may be had by the Multiplication of any two or more of them so taken. But the same Sum (31) without such Subduction, shews how many Aliquot Parts there are in the greatest of those Products, (that is, in the Number made by the continual Multiplication of all the Numbers proposed,) a b c d e. For every one of those Sumptions, are Aliquot Parts of a b c d e, except the last, (which is the whole,) and instead thereof, 1 is also an Aliquot Part; which makes the number of Aliquot Parts, the same with the Number of Sumptions. Only here is to be understood, (which the Rule should have intimated;) that, all the Numbers proposed, are to be Prime Numbers, and each distinct from the other. For if any of them be Compound Numbers, or any Two of them be the same, the Rule for Aliquot Parts will not hold.”

John Wallis (1616–1703) English mathematician

Source: A Discourse of Combinations, Alterations, and Aliquot Parts (1685), Ch.I Of the variety of Elections, or Choice, in taking or leaving One or more, out of a certain Number of things proposed.

“A country cannot be defeated politically unless it is defeated culturally. Our alien rulers knew that they could not conquer India without conquering Hinduism - cultural India's name at its deepest and highest, and the principle of its identity, continuity and reawakening. Therefore Hinduism became an object of their special attack. Physical attack was supplemented by ideological attack. They began to interpret for us our history, our religion, our culture and ourselves. We learnt to look at us through their eyes…. The long period created an atmosphere of mental slavery and imitation. It created a class of people Hindu in their names and by birth but anti-Hindu in orientation, sympathy and loyalty. They knew all the bad things and nothing good about Hinduism. Hindu dharma is now being subverted from within. Anti-Hindu Hindus are very important today; they rule the roost; they write our histories, they define our nation; they control the media, the academia, the politics, the higher administration and higher courts. They are now working as clients of those forces who are planning to revive their old Imperialism… During this period our minds became soft. We became escapists; we wanted to avoid conflict at any cost, even conflict and controversy of ideas, even when this controversy was necessary. We developed an escape-route. We called it "synthesis". We said all religions, all scriptures, all prophets preach the same things. It was intellectual surrender, and our enemies saw it that way; they concluded that we are amenable to anything, that we would clutch at any false hope or idea to avoid a struggle, and that we would do nothing to defend ourselves. Therefore, they have become even more aggressive. It also shows that we have lost spiritual discrimination (viveka), and would entertain any falsehood; this is prajñâ-dosha, drishti-dosha, and it cannot be good for our survival in the long run. People first fall into delusion before they fall into misfortune.”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

On Hinduism (2000)

Bob Dylan photo

“An' though the rules of the road have been lodged
It's only people's games that you got to dodge”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Bringing It All Back Home (1965), It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)

Robert A. Dahl photo
Helen Diner photo
Pat Condell photo
Sir Frederick Pollock, 1st Baronet photo
Alfred de Zayas photo

“It would be another day ruled by this world’s new gods: gold and power.”

Nick Drake (poet) (1961) British writer

Source: The Rahotep series, Book 3: Egypt: The Book of Chaos (2011), Ch. 1

Franklin D. Roosevelt photo
Viktor Schauberger photo
Vladimir Lenin photo
Garry Kasparov photo

“The manuscripts in which these early Greek treatises have been preserved to us seem to be derived from an encyclopaedia compiled during the tenth century, at Constantinople, from the works of various alchemists…. The Greek text. now published by M. Berthelot and M. [Ch. Em. ] Ruelle, custodian of the Library of Ste.-Geneviève, is derived from a careful collation of all these sources, and is accompanied with notes by M. Berthelot bringing light and order into the mystical obscurity in which from the beginning the alchemists enveloped their doctrines.
First among these is the 'Physica et Mystica,' ascribed to Democritus of Abdera, a collection of fragments, among which a few receipts for dyeing in purple may be genuine, while the story of magic and the alchemical teaching are evidently spurious. The philosopher is made to state that his studies were interrupted by the death of his master, Ostanes the Magian. He therefore evoked his spirit from Hades, and learned from him that the books which contained the secrets of his art were in a certain temple. He sought them there in vain, till one day, during a feast in the sanctuary, a column opened, and revealed the precious tomes, in which the doctrines of the Master were summed up in the mysterious words: 'Nature rejoices in Nature, Nature conquers Nature, Nature rules Nature.'
The unknown Alexandrian who wrote under the name of Democritus gives not only receipts for making white alloys of copper, but others which, he positively asserts, will produce gold. M. Berthelot, however, shows in his notes that they can only result in making amalgams for gilding or alloys resembling gold or varnishes which will give a superficial tinge to metals”

Osthanes (-500) pen-name used by several pseudo-anonymous authors of Greek and Latin works of alchemy

, Marcellin Berthelot, Ch. Em. Ruelle, "The Alchemists of Egypt and Greece," Art. VIII. (Jan. 1893) in The Edinburgh Review (Jan.-Apr. 1893) Vol. 177, pp. 208-209. https://books.google.com/books?id=GuvRAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA208

Henry Fielding photo

“Can any man have a higher notion of the rule of right and the eternal fitness of things?”

Henry Fielding (1707–1754) English novelist and dramatist

Book IV, Ch. 4
The History of Tom Jones (1749)

Taslima Nasrin photo
Maddox photo
Subramanian Swamy photo

“I feel that only those who have been oppressed by the society and have been forced to live a backward life should given reservations. If Muslims want to study, then should be given scholarships, good schools, But Muslims and Christians can't have reservation as they have ruled our country.”

Subramanian Swamy (1939) Indian politician

On giving reservations to Muslims and Christians, as quoted in "Muslims and Christians shouldn't ask for reservation, says Subramanian Swamy" http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-muslims-and-christians-shouldn-t-ask-for-reservation-says-subramanian-swamy-1995886, DNA India (16 June 2014)
2011-2014

Bernard Lewis photo
Felix Frankfurter photo

“(Television announcer) The Supreme Court staggered the nation today when they ruled that conception begins the minute you think about sex.”

Nicole Hollander (1939) Cartoonist

Variant: (Television announcer) The Supreme Court staggered the nation today when they ruled that conception begins the minute you think about sex. (pp. 60-61)
Source: Sylvia cartoon strip, pp. 60-61

Camille Paglia photo
Johann Gottlieb Fichte photo
Joseph Addison photo
Dharampal photo

“There is a sense of widespread neglect and decay in the field of indigenous education within a few decades after the onset of British rule. (…) The conclusion that the decay noticed in the early 19th century and more so in subsequent decades originated with European supremacy in India, therefore, seems inescapable. The 1769-70 famine in Bengal (when, according to British record, one-third of the population actually perished), may be taken as a mere forerunner of what was to come. (…) During the latter part of the 19th century, impressions of decay, decline and deprivation began to agitate the mind of the Indian people. Such impressions no doubt resulted from concrete personal, parental and social experience of what had gone before. They were, perhaps, somewhat exaggerated at times. By 1900, it had become general Indian belief that the country had been decimated by British rule in all possible ways; that not only had it become impoverished, but it had been degraded to the furthest possible extent; that the people of India had been cheated of most of what they had; that their customs and manners were ridiculed, and that the infrastructure of their society mostly eroded. One of the statements which thus came up was that the ignorance and illiteracy in India was caused by British rule; and, conversely, that at the beginning of British political dominance, India had had extensive education, learning and literacy. By 1930, much had been written on this point in the same manner as had been written on the deliberate destruction of Indian crafts and industry, and the impoverishment of the Indian countryside.”

Dharampal (1922–2006) Indian historian

Dharmapal: The Beautiful Tree, Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century. (1983)

Jane Roberts photo
Émile Durkheim photo
Larry Wall photo

“Remember though thatTHERE IS NO GENERAL RULE FOR CONVERTING A LIST INTO A SCALAR.”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

In the perl man page.
Documentation

Augustus De Morgan photo
Ralph Waldo Emerson photo
Neal Stephenson photo
Harry V. Jaffa photo

“The great difficulty in forming legitimate governments is in persuading those forming the governments that those who are to be their fellow citizens are equal to them in the rights, which their common government is to protect. Catholics and Protestants in sixteenth-century Europe looked upon each other as less than human, and slaughtered each other without pity and without compunction. It was impossible for there to be a common citizenship of those who did not look upon each other as possessing the same right of conscience. How one ought to worship God cannot be settled by majority rule. A majority of one faith cannot ask a minority of another faith to submit their differences to a vote. George Washington, in 1793, said that our governments were not formed in the gloomy ages of ignorance and superstition, but at a time when the rights of man were better understood than in any previous age. Washington was right, in that such rights were, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, in America, better understood. But they were not perfectly understood, as the continued existence of chattel slavery attests. A difference concerning the equal rights of persons of color made the continued existence of a common government of all Americans impossible. A great civil war had to be fought, ending the existence of slavery, reuniting the nation and rededicating it to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, The Central Idea (2006)

Saddam Hussein photo

“The ruling family in Kuwait is good at blackmail, exploitation, and destruction of their opponents. They had perpetuated a grave U. S. conspiracy against us…. stabbing Iraq in the back with a poisoned dagger.”

Saddam Hussein (1937–2006) Iraqi politician and President

Radio Baghdad, July 1990, quoted in Saddam Hussein: a political biography (2002) by Efraim Karsh and Inari Rautsi.

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling photo

“All rules for study are summed up in this one: learn only in order to create.”

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854) German philosopher (idealism)

Alle Regeln, die man dem Studieren vorschreiben könnte, fassen sich in der einen zusammen: Lerne nur, um selbst zu schaffen.
On University Studies (1803), Third Lecture http://www.zeno.org/Philosophie/M/Schelling,+Friedrich+Wilhelm+Joseph/Vorlesungen+%C3%BCber+die+Methode+des+akademischen+Studiums/3.+%C3%9Cber+die+ersten+Voraussetzungen+des+akademischen+Studium. Cited by Patrick Dunleavy, Authoring a PhD (Basingstoke: Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. vi.
On University Studies (1803)

Samuel Butler photo
Augusto Pinochet photo

“This is not a dictadura [dictatorship/hard rule] but a dictablanda”

Augusto Pinochet (1915–2006) Former dictator of the republic of Chile

soft rule
Speech (September 1983), quoted in "Las frases para el bronce de Pinochet." The Spanish word dura means tough, while blanda means soft.
1980s

Ilana Mercer photo

“Democrats demonstrate daily that they’re not for the rule of law, but for the law of rule, mob rule.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"The Party of Man-Haters," https://townhall.com/columnists/ilanamercer/2018/10/19/the-party-of-manhaters-n2530054 Townhall.com, October 19, 2018
2010s, 2018

Philip K. Howard photo
Robert A. Heinlein photo

“Here is the wisdom of the ages: Men rule but women decide.”

Source: The Number of the Beast (1980), Chapter XLVII : “There are no tomorrows.”, p. 464

Colin Blackburn, Baron Blackburn photo
George Eliot photo
David Hume photo

“The admirers and followers of the Alcoran insist on the excellent moral precepts interspersed through that wild and absurd performance. But it is to be supposed, that the Arabic words, which correspond to the English, equity, justice, temperance, meekness, charity were such as, from the constant use of that tongue, must always be taken in a good sense; and it would have argued the greatest ignorance, not of morals, but of language, to have mentioned them with any epithets, besides those of applause and approbation. But would we know, whether the pretended prophet had really attained a just sentiment of morals? Let us attend to his narration; and we shall soon find, that he bestows praise on such instances of treachery, inhumanity, cruelty, revenge, bigotry, as are utterly incompatible with civilized society. No steady rule of right seems there to be attended to; and every action is blamed or praised, so far only as it is beneficial or hurtful to the true believers.”

David Hume, Of the Standard of Taste, 1760
Variant: The admirers and followers of the Alcoran insist on the excellent moral precepts interspersed through that wild and absurd performance. But it is to be supposed, that the Arabic words, which correspond to the English, equity, justice, temperance, meekness, charity were such as, from the constant use of that tongue, must always be taken in a good sense; and it would have argued the greatest ignorance, not of morals, but of language, to have mentioned them with any epithets, besides those of applause and approbation. But would we know, whether the pretended prophet had really attained a just sentiment of morals? Let us attend to his narration; and we shall soon find, that he bestows praise on such instances of treachery, inhumanity, cruelty, revenge, bigotry, as are utterly incompatible with civilized society. No steady rule of right seems there to be attended to; and every action is blamed or praised, so far only as it is beneficial or hurtful to the true believers.

Uthradom Thirunal Marthanda Varma photo