Quotes About Laws

Laws and customs may be creative of vice; and should be therefore perpetually under process of observation and correction: but laws and customs cannot be creative of virtue: they may encourage and help to preserve it; but they cannot originate it.

Laws don't really restrain people. Ninety-eight percent of people follow a virtuous course with or without laws.

I can't say I'm particularly happy about all the spam and the viruses and the equivalent that we see on the Net, but I think technology can deal with many of the problems that we're now seeing, whether it's filtering or whatever, and laws may help a lot.

Even people who have successfully obtained a visa are sometimes being turned back at the airport. Such incidents have never happened in the past but are increasing now because even low level officers of the border patrol department are being entrusted with too much discretion power on how they execute the laws.

If we don't enforce visa laws, we basically have open borders.

When the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996 after a searing, four-year civil war, they immediately instituted laws which fit their utopic vision of the time of Islam's founding more than 1,300 years earlier. Afghan women's lives offered the most visible sign of the imagined past to which Afghanistan's present was to be returned.

The broader appeal of statistics lay in the idea of an order beneath apparent randomness. Individuals—molecules or humans—might act unpredictably, but statistics seemed to show that in the aggregate their behavior conformed to stable laws.

It must be remembered that there is no real reason to expect anything in particular from mankind; good and evil are local expedients--or their lack--and not in any sense cosmic truths or laws.

All my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.

Gun control has not worked in D.C. The only people who have guns are criminals. We have the strictest gun laws in the nation and one of the highest murder rates. It's quicker to pull your Smith & Wesson than to dial 911 if you're being robbed.

There was no sign of Plato, and I was told later that he had gone to live in his Republic , where he was cheerfully submitting to his own Laws . [...] None of the Stoics were present. Rumour had it that they were still clambering up the steep hill of Virtue [...]. As for the Sceptics, it appeared that they were extremely anxious to get there, but still could not quite make up their minds whether or not the island really existed.

Let the masses understand that these robbers hold this property (which is so much unpaid labor) under the plea of the laws which they themselves [the robbers] have made, and by the sanction of the very men they have locked out to starve.

Faith left to itself … exalts itself above the laws of natural morality. … [B]y so much higher are duties to God than duties towards man[.]

It was the ideas of the classical economists that removed the checks imposed by age-old laws, customs, and prejudices upon technological improvement and freed the genius of reformers and innovators from the straitjackets) of the guilds, government tutelage, and social pressure of various kinds. It was they that reduced the prestige of conquerors and expropriators and demonstrated the social benefits derived from business activity.

That the social life of human beings is subject to definite limitations; that it is governed by a set of laws that are comparable with those of Nature; these are notions that are unknown to the etatist. For the etatist, everything is a question of Macht - power, force, might. And his conception of Macht is crudely materialistic.

It then dawned on me that all real improvements in the conditions of the working classes were the result of Capitalism. And that social laws frequently brought about the very opposite of what the legislation was intended to achieve.

the dead still obey the laws of physics, don't they?

Listen, listen, if I know my world, which is doubtful, but if I do, I know it is chaotic, mean and vicious, with laws cast in the wrong moulds, a fair conception gone awry, in short an awful place, and yet, and yet a place capable of glory in those rare moments when a little light breaks forth, and something is not explained, not forgiven, but merely illuminated.

Closed systems are extremely dangerous because they deself their members and deprive them of self-esteem. Closed systems are dangerous because they allow no feedback. When no new information can be integrated into a system, it feeds upon itself and becomes an absolutizing agent. Its own beliefs become sacred laws; its own rules infallible; its own leaders all-powerful. This is exactly the problem with monarchial patriarchy and the poisonous pedagogy it spawns.

He had many names, but one nature, and this unique nature made him subject to certain laws not binding upon ordinary persons. In a compensatory fashion, he was also free from certain other laws more commonly in force.

The dream they dream is beautiful. A dream as bold as your own, or bolder. You want to explore and colonize the universe; they wish to extend the lifespan of the universe beyond all boundaries, to remake its laws, and shape reality to banish entropy, decay, and death forever. I'd like to believe in that dream whether it's true or not.

The laws that Charondas gave to Catana,... A man might divorce his wife, or a wife her husband, said Charondas, but then he or she must not marry anyone younger than the divorced mate.

The laws of physics ... seem to be the product of exceedingly ingenious design... The universe must have a purpose.

From my early youth I have had the strongest desire to understand or explain whatever I observed. ... To group all facts under some general laws.