Great Throughts Treasury

"I believe marriage to be the best and most important relation that can exist between two human beings. If it has not often been realized hitherto, that is chiefly because husband and wife have regarded themselves as each other’s policeman. If marriage is to achieve its possibilities, husbands and wives must learn to understand that whatever the law may say, in their private lives they must be free." -

"When we pray, we should feel the seriousness of speaking directly to the Almighty. The concept of seriousness should not be mistaken for sadness since sadness is a transgression. Seriousness should stem from the true joy of fulfilling a mitzvah [biblical law or good deed], the joy of having the merit to pray to the Almighty." - Moshe Schwab

"The best way to do good to ourselves, is to do it to others; the right way to gather, is to scatter. This is the law of benefits between men; the one ought to forget at once what he has given, and the other ought never forget what he has received." -

"Ambition is like hunger; it obeys no law but its appetite." -

"He who cannot rule his passions, nor hold them in check out of respect for the law, while he may be excusable on the ground of weakness, is incapable of enjoying conformity of spirit and knowledge and love of God; and he is lost inevitably." -

"Socialists are filled with the enthusiasm of equality... Equality of possession or of rights and equality before the law are diametrically opposed to each other. The object of equality before the law is to make the state entirely neutral." - William Graham Sumner

"Custom is the law of fools." -

"Neither the tenuous things of the human spirit nor the gross material needs of human life can come in contact with this business enterprise [Big Business] in such a way as to deflect its course from the line of least resistance, which is the line of greatest present gain within the law." - Thorstein Veblen, fully Thorstein Bunde Veblen, born Torsten Bunde Veblen

"See how the people act, and that is the law." - Abaye NULL

"Facts, when combined with ideas, constitute the greatest force in the world. They are greater than armaments, greater than finance, greater than science, business and law because they constitute the common denominator of all of them." - Carl William Ackerman

"Among the natural rights of the Colonists are these: First, a right to life; Secondly, to liberty; Thirdly, to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can. These are evident branches of, rather than deductions from, the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature." - Samuel Adams

"He never taught any law or practice contrary to the Written Law. Only after his death... many of his disciples introduced practices and doctrines altogether foreign to him, removing thereby the cornerstone of the Law while winning the multitudes." - Caleb Afendopolo

"Intellectual and spiritual leaders hailed the cause of civil rights and gave little thought to where the civil disobedience road might end. But defiance of the law, even for the best reasons, opens a tiny hole in the dike and soon a trickle becomes a flood... And while no thinking person denies that social injustice exits, no thinking person can condone any group, for any reason, taking justice into his own hands. Once this is permitted, democracy dies; for democracy is sustained through one great premise: the premise that civil rights are balanced by civil responsibilities." - Spiro T. Agnew, fully Spiro Theodore Agnew

"Truth is the disciple of the ascetic, the quest of the mystic, the faith of the simple, the ransom of the weak, the standard of the righteous, the doctrine of the meek, and the challenge of Nature. Together, all these constitute the Law of the Universe." - John Hay Allison

"Modern invention has banished the spinning-wheel, and the same law of progress makes the woman of today a different woman from her grandmother." -

"Many duties imposed by law are hostile to nature." - Antiphon NULL

"One universe made up of all that is; and one God in it all, and one principle of being, and one law, the reason shared by all thinking creatures, and one truth." - Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus

"This is a property of the rational soul, love of one’s neighbor, and truth and modesty, and to value nothing more than itself, which is also the property of Law. Thus then right reason differs not at all from the reason of justice." - Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus

"The purpose of human law is to lead men to virtue not suddenly, but gradually." -

"When a law is changed, the binding power of the law is diminished, in so far as custom is abolished. Therefore human law should never be changed, unless, in some way or other, the common welfare be compensated according to the extent of the harm done in this respect." -

"Necessity has no law." - Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL

"The existence of law is one thing; its merit or demerit is another." - John Austin

"It is a terrible, inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own; in the face of the victim one sees oneself." -

"Beauty is but the sensible image of the Infinite. Like truth and justice it lives within us; like virtue and the moral law it is a companion of the soul." - George Bancroft

"We look at change but we do not see it. We speak of change, but we do not think about it. We say that change exists, that everything changes, that change is the very law of things: yes, we say it and we repeat it; but those are only words, and we reason and philosophize as though change did not exist." - Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson

"Love is the fulfilling of the law." - Bible or The Bible or Holy Bible NULL

"Creation is the production of order. What a simple, but, at the same time comprehensive and pregnant principle is here! Plato could tell his disciples no ultimate truth of more pervading significance. Order is the law of all intelligible existence." - John Stuart Blakie

"The law of the Sabbath is the keystone of the arch of public morals; take it away, and the whole fabric falls." - William Garden Blaikie

"Who would give a law to lovers? Love is unto itself a higher law." - Boethius, fully Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius NULL

"The grandest of all laws is the law of progressive development. Under it, in the wide sweep of things, men grow wiser as they grow older, and societies better." - Christian Nestell Bovee

"The grandest of all laws is the law of progressive development. Under it, in the wide sweep of things, men grow wiser as they grow older, and societies better." - John Christian Bovee

"The law is not an end in itself, nor does it provide ends. It is preeminently a means to serve what we think is right." -

"Finding facts in actuality is less rewarded than developing a theory of law that explains the facts, and herein lies an enticement. In making sense out of the unruly substance of nature, and in trying to get there first, a scientist is sometimes tempted to play fast and loose with the facts in order to make a theory look more compelling than it really is." - William J. Broad and Nicholas J. Wade

"Avoid law suits beyond all things; they influence your conscience, impair your health, and dissipate your property." - Jean de La Bruyère

"Never in this world can hatred be stilled by hatred; it will be stilled only by non-hatred - this is the law eternal." -

"Nature's mighty law is change." - Robert Burns, aka Rabbie Burns, Scotland's favourite son, the Ploughman Poet, Robden of Solway Firth, the Bard of Ayrshire and in Scotland as simply The Bard

"Knowledge cannot be stolen from us. It cannot be bought or sold. We may be poor, and the sheriff may come and sell our furniture, or drive away our cow, or take our pet lamb, and leave us homeless and penniless; abut he cannot lay the law’s hand upon the jewelry of our minds." - Elihu Burritt

"The law... must have a principle of growth." -

"While the law (of competition) may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is the best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department." - Andrew Carnegie

"Law is not law, if it violate the principles of eternal justice." -

"It is a principle of Jewish tradition... not to simply cling to the dry letter of the law, but to be guided by its spirit." - Áron Chorin

"Thought has always worked by opposition... By dual, hierarchized oppositions... Wherever an ordering intervenes, a law organizes the thinkable by (dual, irreconcilable; or mitigable, dialectical) oppositions. And all the couples of oppositions are couples." - Hélène Cixous

"Reason is the life of the law; nay, the common law itself is nothing else but reason." - Edward Coke, fully Sir Edward Coke

"A natural law is a process, not a power: it is a method of operation, not an operator. A natural law, without God behind it, is no more than a glove without a hand in it." - Joseph Cook

"One with the law is a majority." - Calvin Coolidge, fully John Calvin Coolidge, Jr.

""Order is Heaven's first law," and a mind without order can by no possibility be either a healthy or a happy mind." - Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, also known as Mulock, Mrs Craik, Mrs Craik, Miss Mulok, Miss Muloch, Miss Mulock

"It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life and from use and disuse: a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms, Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been, and are being evolved." - Charles Darwin, fully Charles Robert Darwin

"The first principle asserts that at least some mental events interact causally with physical events... The second principle is that where there is causality, there must be a law: events related as cause and effect fall under strict deterministic laws... The third principle is that there are no strict deterministic laws on the basis of which mental events can be predicted and explained... from the fact that there can be no strict psychophysical laws, and without our other two principles, we can infer the truth of a version of the identity theory, that is, a theory that identifies at least some mental events with physical events." - Donald Davidson

"Motorists have exhibited the one worse attitude than defiance of law - indifference to it." -

"Unless the cause of peace based on law gathers behind it the force and zeal of a religion, it hardly can hope to succeed." - Albert Einstein