Quotes about Laws

Valor consists in the power of self-recovery, so that a man cannot have his flank turned, cannot be out-generalled, but put him where you will, he stands. This can only be by his preferring truth to his past apprehension of truth; and his alert acceptance of it, from whatever quarter; the intrepid conviction that his laws, his relations to society, his Christianity, his world may at any time be superseded and decease.

Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.

In inquiries respecting the laws of the world and the frame of things, the highest reason is always the truest.

The laws of friendship are great, austere, and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals.

Transcendentalists have been accused of being rebels and rule-breakers. But if they disregard society's customs and laws, it's because they're listening to conscience and obeying the Law Maker within. There are situations where virtue asks us to break the rules.

A society that hates laws that guard the soul despises not so much the laws as much as it despises the very thought of a soul. Those who belong to such a society consider the flesh the totality of their being.

Once humanity violated that single rule and took charge, however, hundreds of laws had to be passed, because each injunction could die the death of a thousand qualifications through constant exceptions to the rule.

Greenleaf concludes that the resurrection of Christ is one of the best-supported events in history according to the laws of legal evidence administered in courts of justice.

What can be explained can also be predicted, if one knows the initial events and the laws covering their succession.

This means that a peculiar burden falls on property owners. Since the laws protecting their property will be effective only when they are able to persuade others to obey those laws, they must introduce a theatricality into their ownership sufficiently engaging that their opponents will live by its script.

if the M.C.C. were to agree, in a thoughtless moment, that the ball must be so hit by the batsman that it should never come down to earth again, cricket would become an impossibility. A vivid sense of reality usually restrains sports committees from promulgating laws of this kind; other legislators occasionally lack this salutary realism.

When the laws regulating human society are so formed as to come into collision with the nature of things, and in particular with the fundamental realities of human nature, they will end by producing an impossible situation which, unless the laws are altered, will issue in such catastrophes as war, pestilence and famine. Catastrophes thus caused are the execution of universal law upon arbitrary enactments which contravene the facts; they are thus properly called by theologians, judgments of God.