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Past Quotes

“The law of humanity ought to be composed of the past, the present, and the future, that we bear within us; whoever possesses but one of these terms, has but a fragment of the law of the moral world.”

World Past Law Humanity Term Moral Bears Ought Fragments

Author:Edgar Quinet

“The average mind is slow in grasping a truth, but when the most thoroughly organized, centralized institution, maintained at an excessive national expense, has proven a complete social failure, the dullest must begin to question its right to exist. The time is past when we can be content with our social fabric merely because it is "ordained by divine right," or by the majesty of the law.”

Mind Past Law Social Divine Institutions Average Organized Expenses Fabric Proven Majesty Grasping Divine Right Average Minds

Book:Anarchism: Top Crime Collections

Source: Anarchism: Top Crime Collections

“The eternal struggle in the law between constancy and change is largely a struggle between history and reason, between past reason and present needs.”

Needs Reason Past Law Struggle Eternal Constancy

Author:Felix Frankfurter

“Historical science is not worse, more restricted, or less capable of achieving firm conclusions because experiment, prediction, and subsumption under invariant laws of nature do not represent its usual working methods. The sciences of history use a different mode of explanation, rooted in the comparative and observational richness in our data. We cannot see a past event directly, but science is usually based on inference, not unvarnished observation (you don't see electrons, gravity, or black holes either).”

“No man-made law ever, no matter whether derived from the past or projected onto a distant, unforeseeable future, can or should ever be empowered to claim that it is greater than the Natural Law from which it stems and to which it must inevitably return in the eternal rhythm of creation and decline of all things natural.”

Men Should Made Matter Past Law Natural Greater Creation Return Eternal All Things Claims Rhythm Decline Stem Empowered Natural Law

Book:Selected Writings: An Introduction to Orgonomy

Source: Selected Writings: An Introduction to Orgonomy

“Because we have sought to cover up past evil, though it still persists, we have been powerless to check the new evil of today.Evil unchecked grows, Evil tolerated poisons the whole system. And because we have tolerated our past and present evils, international affairs are poisoned and law and justice have disappeared from them.”

Source: Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru: Advisory Board: M. Chalapathi Rau, H. Y. Sharada Prasad, and B. R. Nanda; General Editor: S. Gopal

“At one time, many philosophers held that faultless "laws of thought" were somehow inherent, a priori, in the very nature of mind. This belief was twice shaken in the past century; first when Russell and his successors showed how the logic men employ can be defective, and later when Freud and Piaget started to reveal the tortuous ways in which our minds actually develop.”

Men Way Mind Firsts Past Law Belief Century Logic Philosopher One Time Inherent Successors Defective

Author:Jean Piaget

“Our principle is: to prevent all command over man by his fellowmen, to, make state, government, laws, or whatsoever form of compulsion existing, a thing of the past, to establish full freedom for all. Anarchism means first and foremost freedom from all government.”

Men Firsts Mean States Government Past Form Law Principles Command Compulsion Anarchism State Government

Book:The Social Monster: A Paper on Communism and Anarchism

Source: The Social Monster: A Paper on Communism and Anarchism

“Order is the law of nature, the universal trend, the cosmic direction. If time is an arrow, that arrow points toward order. The future is pattern, organization, union, intensification; the past, randomness, confusion, disintegration, dissipation.”

Ifs Past Law Order Organization Universal Unions Patterns Confusion Trends Cosmic Laws Of Nature Arrows Randomness Disintegration Dissipation

Book:Einstein's Dreams

Source: Einstein's Dreams

“So long as you create laws that define women as victims, as creatures that demand protection, that need bodyguards, you are going to perpetuate the very worst of our sexist past.”

Needs Long Past Law Worst Demand Creatures Victim Protection Sexist Bodyguard

Author:Warren Farrell

“Custom is the law of one description of fools, and fashion of another; but the two parties often clash--for precedent is the legislator of the first, and novelty of the last. Custom, therefore, looks to things that are past, and fashion to things that are present.”

Firsts Looks Two Lasts Past Law Party Fashion Fool Description Customs Novelty Clash Legislators Precedent

Book:Lacon, Or, Many Things in a Few Words: Addressed to Those who Think

Source: Lacon, Or, Many Things in a Few Words: Addressed to Those who Think

“But there is, I have learned, no permanent escape from the past. It may be an unrecognized law of our nature that we should be drawn back, inevitably, to the place where we have suffered most.”

Should May Past Law Permanent I Have Learned

Author:Ellen Glasgow

“To-day Massachusetts; and the whole of the American republic, from the border of Maine to the Pacific slopes, and from the Lakes to the Gulf, stand upon the immutable and everlasting principles of equal and exact justice. The days of unrequited labor are numbered with the past. Fugitive slave laws are only remembered as relics of that barbarism which John Wesley pronounced "the sum of all villainies," and whose knowledge of its blighting effects was matured by his travels in Georgia and the Carolinas.”

“It is one of the strange facts of experience that when we try to think about the future, our thoughts jump backwards. It may well be that nature has some fundamental metaphysical law by which opening up what we call the future also opens up the past in equal degree.”

Thinking Trying Wells May Facts Past Law Strange Equal Degrees Fundamentals Opening Our Thoughts Backwards Metaphysical Opening Up

Book:Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking

Source: Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking

“The laws of war, that restrain the exercise of national rapine and murder, are founded on two principles of substantial interest: the knowledge of the permanent benefits which may be obtained by a moderate use of conquest, and a just apprehension lest the desolation which we inflict on the enemy's country may be retaliated on our own. But these considerations of hope and fear are almost unknown in the pastoral state of nations.”

Source: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire