Quotes About Precedents

There's your law of precedents; there's your utility of traditions; there's the story of your obstinate survival of old beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and now not even hovering in the air! There's orthodoxy!

the movement owes a great deal to earlier movements and to a variety of cultural and religious traditions. It owes a special debt to the Native people of North America and New Zealand. The precedents and roots of restorative justice are much wider and deeper than the Mennonite-led initiatives of the 1970s. Indeed, they are as old as human history.

It's only now that I realize that behaviour always has a context and precedents, it's what you do rather than what you are, although we often never recognise that context or understand what these precedents are.

This time may seem different, but all too often a deeper look shows it is not. Encouragingly, history does point to warning signs that policy makers can look at to assess risk—if only they do not become too drunk with their credit bubble–fueled success and say, as their predecessors have for centuries, "This time is different

Since no country has had any experience with the tactical use of nuclear weapons, the possibility of miscalculation is considerable. The temptation to use the same target system as for conventional war and thereby produce vast casualties will be overwhelming. The pace of operations may out strip the possibilities of negotiation. Both sides would be operating in the dark with no precedents to guide them.119

The error of those who reason by precedents drawn from antiquity, respecting the rights of man, is that they do not go far enough into antiquity.

Things like Abu Ghraib and even Guantanamo are not new things: there are many precedents.

S]ome score of members of the High Court of Chancery bar ought to be --- as here they are --- mistily engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horse-hair warded heads against walls of words, and making a pretence of equity with serious faces ....

I love Obama, and I love the fact that it's a black president of the United States of America, but he's not the first black president. Robert Mugabe is a black president, too, so let's not get to talking about precedents being set.

The road to totalitarian domination leads through many intermediate stages for which we can find numerous analogies and precedents.

Most of the problems a President has to face have their roots in the past.

During my seven years and eight months as chief Cabinet secretary, I noticed that when policies are slow to move forward, it's usually because of bureaucrats' sectionalism and a penchant for sticking with precedents.

A maverick feels like he has no choice however difficult his choice of expression. In my case, it was going backwards into tonality. It seemed so wrong. The idea that progress is going into the past in a new way is very strange, even though there are precedents.

I don't seem to be able to learn from experience or anything useful. History doesn't help me. Precedents don't inform my experience.

But the question for our purposes is whether the broad pattern of world history would have been altered significantly if some genius inventor had not been born at a particular place and time. The answer is clear: there has never been any such person. All recognized famous inventors had capable predecessors and successors and made their improvements at a time when society was capable of using their product.

Our art culture makes no attempt to search the past for precedents, but transforms the entire past into a sequence of provisional responses to a problem that remains intact.

The best companies in the world have all had predecessors. 'YouTube' was a dating site. You always have to evolve into something else.

As a country we have more of a political constitution than a legal one, and as such it operates via conventions and precedents.

To the extent that the judicial profession becomes the daily routine of deciding cases on the most secure precedents and the narrowest grounds available, the judicial mind atrophies and its perspective shrinks.

Learn from examples in history lest thou be made an example

There were, of course, precedents for questioning the wisdom of war: Artabanus, Archidamus, and Nicias had all done that, if unsuccessfully, and Thucydides' doomed Melians had raised timeless misgivings about the conduct of wars once started. No one before Augustine, however, had set standards to be met by states in choosing war.

It is found by experience that admirable laws and right precedents among the good have their origin in the misdeeds of others.

But we learn nothing from any lesson because we have not the wisdom to work backwards from the particular to the general, and imagine ourselves always to be going through an experience which is without precedents in the past

Think about the precedents you are setting. It's the Left that runs the world on reckless emotionalism. Don't join.