Law Quotes - Page 178

I, indeed, following the true law of history, have never set down any fact that I have not learned from trustworthy speakers or writers.

The one governmental agency that has no ambition.

I would rather create a precedent than find one.

Possession is nine-tenths of the law.

All our liberties are due to men who, when their conscience has compelled them, have broken the laws of the land.

This law (regarding the theoretical efficiency of heat engines by Mr. Joule), and the law of the maximum efficiency of heat engines, are particular cases of a general law which regulates all transformation of energy, and is the basis of the Science of Energetics.

The words 'theory' and 'practice' are of Greek origin; they carry our thoughts back to the ancient philosophers by whom they were contrived, and by whom they were also contrasted and placed in opposition, as denoting two mutually conflicting and mutually inconsistent ideas. ... [this fallacy] based on a double system of natural laws retarded for centuries the development of physical science, notably mechanics.

Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.

The Constitution was framed fundamentally as a bulwark against governmental power, and preventing the arbitrary administration of punishment is a basic ideal of any society that purports to be governed by the rule of law.

I deem it established, then, that the Constitution does not recognize property in man, but leaves that question, as between the states, to the law of nature and of nations.

Tears are the natural penalties of pleasure. It is a law that we should pay for all that we enjoy.

Many a politician wishes there was a law to burn old records.

I find purer philosophy in a Poem than in a Conclusion of Geometry, a chemical analysis, or a physical law

The bravery of Stanley Kramer's 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner' amounted to two Hollywood legends - Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy - telling the world that a black son-in-law is something they can live with, and so should you, especially if he looks like Sidney Poitier and has degrees.

Every diamond has the ability to shine when there is someone to recognize its good facets and inhibit its flaws.

Law is nothing unless close behind it stands a warm, living public opinion.

To hear some men talk of the government, you would suppose that Congress was the law of gravitation, and kept the planets in their places.

The law is meant to work for justice. But people who know themselves know that, at some point, justice had better be mitigated by mercy. And you don't get to mercy by a legal principle. You get to mercy by way of imagination, sympathy, tenderness of heart - which are not weaknesses.

The law of flying was not discovered by the contemplation of things staying on the ground.

I have absolute faith that anything can come to one who trusts to the unlimited help of the Universal Intelligence that is within, so long as one works within the law, always gives more to others than they expect, and does it cheerfully and courteously.

Right up till the 1980s, SF envisioned giant mainframe computers that ran everything remotely, that ingested huge amounts of information and regurgitated it in startling ways, and that behaved (or were programmed to behave) very much like human beings... Now we have 14-year-olds with more computing power on their desktops than existed in the entire world in 1960. But computers in fiction are still behaving in much the same way as they did in the Sixties. That's because in fiction [artificial intelligence] has to follow the laws of dramatic logic, just like human characters.

There is a law of gratitude, and it is . . . the natural principle that action and reaction are always equal and in opposite directions. The grateful outreaching of your mind in thankful praise to supreme intelligence is a liberation or expenditure of force. It cannot fail to reach that to which it is addressed, and the reaction is an instantaneous movement toward you.

America has always been a country of amateurs where the professional, that is to say, the man who claims authority as a member of an élite which knows the law in some field or other, is an object of distrust and resentment.

Dentists, lawyers, doctors are all a bunch of thieving bastards.

The sentiment of justice is so natural, and so universally acquired by all mankind, that it seems to be independent of all law, all party, all religion.