This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Religion is not mere conformity to moral law, it is an espousal of moral ideals, a dedication of the heart, a loyal devotion, the perpetual renewal of a right spirit within us." - Durant Drake
"Evolution, with the advent of conscious man, ceases to rule by outer law; it becomes the inner law of man’s being and can only advance through his volition… Man must fight to prepare the advent of the spiritual being he is destined to become." - L. Francis Edmunds
"It is the consciousness of love by which man reconciles himself with God, or rather with his own nature as represented in the moral law." - Ludwig Feuerbach, fully Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach
"The present moment is never intolerable. It is always what is coming in five minutes or five days that makes people despair. The Law of Life is to live in the present, and this applies to both time and place. Keep your attention to the present moment, and in the place where your body is now." - Emmet Fox
"What you think upon grows. Whatever you allow to occupy your mind you magnify in your own life. Whether the subject of your thought be good or bad, the law works and the condition grows. Any subject that you tend to keep out of your mind tends to diminish in your life, because what you do not use atrophies." - Emmet Fox
"It is the Law that any difficulties that can come to you at any time, no matter what they are, must be exactly what you need most at the moment, to enable you to take the next step forward by overcoming them. There need be no unqualified evils. The only real misfortune, the only real tragedy, comes when we suffer without learning the lesson." - Emmet Fox
"The old view that the principles of right and wrong are immutable and eternal is no longer tenable. The moral world is as little exempt as the physical world from the law of ceaseless change, of perpetual flux." - James Frazer, aka James George Frazer
"The moral law has its seat in the soul of man. Truth is within ourselves. There is an inmost center in us all where Truth abides in fullness." - Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
"That which is not just is not law." - William Lloyd Garrison
"Hungry men have no respect for law, authority, or human life." - Marcus Garvey
"Law is not served by power is an illusion, but power not ruled by law is a menace." - Arthur Goldberg, fully Arthur Joseph Goldberg
"The most basic law of economics, namely that one cannot get something for nothing." - Roy F. Harrod, fully Sir Henry Roy Forbes Harrod
"It is… the essence of the demand for equality before the law that people should be treated alike in spite of the fact that they are different." - F. A. Hayek, fully Friedrich August Hayek or von Hayek
"An act of injustice is condemned, not because the law is broken, but because a person has been hurt." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"What is hateful to you don’t do to another. This is the whole Torah [i.e., Law]; the rest is commentary." - Hillel NULL
"The moral law obliges us to regard every man as an end in himself." - Wilhelm von Humboldt, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt
"The belief in progress, not as an ideal but as an indisputable fact, not as a task for humanity but as a law of Nature, has been the working faith of the West for about a hundred and fifty years." - William Ralph Inge
"The law of duty demands moral perfection or holiness. But this is impossible in our present life, therefore it can only be attained by an indefinite progress, and this progress is only possible under the hypothesis of an existence and a personality that re indefinitely prolonged." - P. A. R. Janet and G. Sèailles
"No man has a moral right to use his property, a creature of God, against the children of God. Racial discrimination even in the use of purely private property, is immoral at least as transgressing the supreme law of charity." - William J. Kenealy
"An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its justice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for law." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
"It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Nine-tenths of human law is about possession." - Barbara Kingsolver
"Anarchism (from the Greek… contrary to authority), the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government – Harmony in such a society not being obtained by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted form the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being." - Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin
"If God truly is the Absolute, then he is all these in one: Nirvana, insofar as he is the goal of the path of liberation; Dharma, insofar as he is described as the law of the cosmos and humanity; Emptiness, insofar as he constantly escapes all affirmative specifications; Primordial Buddha, insofar as he is the origin of all that is. Could one not, after all the explanations of emptiness, nirvana and dharmakaya in comparison with the Christian understanding of the Absoulte, despite all the divergences, also speak of convergence between Christianity and Buddhism?" -
"All things in nature work silently. They come into being and possess nothing. They fulfill their function and make no claim. All things alike do their work, and then we see them subside. When they have reached their bloom, each returns to its origin… This reversion is an eternal law. To know that law is wisdom." - Lao Tzu, ne Li Urh, also Laotse, Lao Tse, Lao Tse, Lao Zi, Laozi, Lao Zi, La-tsze
"The more law and orders are multiplied, the more theft and violence increase." - Lao Tzu, ne Li Urh, also Laotse, Lao Tse, Lao Tse, Lao Zi, Laozi, Lao Zi, La-tsze
"When the law is against you, argue the facts. When the facts are against you, argue the law. When both are against you, call the other lawyers’s names." - Lawyer’s Rule NULL
"The evil of the Holocaust was realized through the exercise of a certain kind of power – coercive power. It was a power that sought to dominate and control. It was a power legitimated through law, buttressed by propaganda, augmented by terror, and affected through all the institutions of society." - Mary Jo Leddy
"The press has its own version of Gresham’s Law: the tendency, in the competition for readers, to let the scandalous and sensational drive out serious news." - Anthony Lewis
"Nobody ought to be compelled in matters of religion either by law or force." - John Locke
"Possession is nine-tenths of the law." - Lord Mansfield, William Murray
"Do something useful and you will have everything you want. Doors are shut for those who are dull and lazy; life is secure for those who obey the law of work." - José Martí, fully José Julián Martí Pérez
"[McClaughry’s Law of Public Policy] Politicians who vote huge expenditures to alleviate problems get reelected; those who propose structural changes to prevent problems get early retirement." - John McClaughry
"The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift or law there is far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a national philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society." -
"The law of our life can be summed up in the axiom “be what you are.”" - Thomas Merton
"There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice." - Charles De Montesquieu, formally Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu
"The Law of Attraction attracts to you everything you need, according to the nature of your thought life. Your environment and financial condition are the perfect reflection of your habitual thinking. Thought rules the world." - Joseph Murphy
"Toleration… is not true liberty when it is only a gracious concession by the state to the individual. Gracious concessions are incompatible with liberty of religion which is not something that a state, or an absolutist church offers, but that which the citizen claims and the law protects." - Cecil Northcott
"Evolution... is comprehensible only if we admit that it is dominated by a finality, a precise and distant goal... telefinality orients the march of evolution as a whole and has acted, ever since the appearance of life on earth, as a distant directing force tending to develop a being endowed with a conscience, a spiritually and morally perfect being. To attain this goal, this force acts on the laws of the unorganized world in such a way that the normal play of the second law of thermodynamics is always deflected in the same direction." -
"It is not safe to be immoral… Against the rock of moral law, earth’s conquerors and exploiters hurl themselves eventually to their own destruction. While yet there is time.. we must take steps to prevent the helpless rush of man to his doom." - Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, fully Sir or Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
"[Bernard Law Montgomery] always gave the impression that he had nothing in the world to do except the business at hand. There were never any papers on his desk, there were never any interruptions; one almost had the feeling that here was an idle man, and that but for one’s own visit he would have been at a loss to fill up his time. Most remarkable of all, to myself, was that he actually listened to what I said." -
"Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty." - Henry Martyn Robert
"No soldier is obliged to obey an order counter to the law of God. No one has to comply with an immoral law. It is time now that you recover your conscience and obey its dictates rather than the command of sin." - Oscar Romero, formally Óscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez