Quotes About Lawgivers

The Ancients subjected themselves to a fierce discipline of detachment from public opinion. Although they inevitably had to try to influence political life in their favor, they never seriously thought of themselves as founders or lawgivers. The mixture of unwise power and powerless wisdom, in the ancients view, would always end up with power strengthened and wisdom compromised. He who flirts with power, Socrates said, will be compelled to lie with it.

Philolaus of Corinth (about 730 B.C.?) had supposedly enacted regulations ensuring that the farms at Thebes might remain the same number in perpetuity. The Corinthian Pheidon, "one of the most ancient of the lawgivers," purportedly argued that the population and the number of plots ought always to remain roughly equal. An even more shadowy figure, Phaleas the Chalcedonian, advanced the concept that all citizens of the polis ought to hold equal amounts of property.148

The most miraculous researchers into language are also, from time to time, the most impotent exegetes; -- the strongest lawgivers are the destroyers of their tables, or they will become one-eyed through the fault of their children.

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible. I dislike the stuff. I do not believe in it, for its own sake, at all... My lawgivers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul. My temple stands not upon Mount Moriah but in the Elysian Field where even the immoral are admitted. My motto is 'Lord, I disbelieve — help thou my unbelief.

Lawgivers make the citizens food by training them in habits of right action - this is the aim of all legislation, and if it fails to do this it is a failure.

because none of the wording is included in the artistic rendering. Moses is depicted cradling two tablets on a frieze that also includes historical lawgivers like Hammurabi, Solomon, Confucius, Muhammad, Napoleon, and the Roman emperor Augustus. The display represents the evolution of the law over the centuries. It's not intended to promote religion.

Fight vigorously against the wolves, but on behalf of the sheep, not against the sheep. And this you may do by inveighing against the laws and lawgivers, and yet at the same time observing these laws with the weak, lest they be offended, until they shall themselves recognize the tyranny, and understand their own liberty.