Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Related Quotes

Jean de La Bruyère

Avoid law suits beyond all things; they influence your conscience, impair your health, and dissipate your property.

Conscience | Health | Influence | Law | Property | Wisdom |

John Christian Bovee

The grandest of all laws is the law of progressive development. Under it, in the wide sweep of things, men grow wiser as they grow older, and societies better.

Better | Law | Men | Wisdom |

Boethius, fully Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius NULL

Who would give a law to lovers? Love is unto itself a higher law.

Law | Love | Wisdom |

William J. Broad and Nicholas J. Wade

Finding facts in actuality is less rewarded than developing a theory of law that explains the facts, and herein lies an enticement. In making sense out of the unruly substance of nature, and in trying to get there first, a scientist is sometimes tempted to play fast and loose with the facts in order to make a theory look more compelling than it really is.

Law | Nature | Order | Play | Sense | Wisdom |

Andrew Carnegie

While the law (of competition) may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is the best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department.

Competition | Individual | Law | Race | Survival | Wisdom |

Hélène Cixous

Thought has always worked by opposition... By dual, hierarchized oppositions... Wherever an ordering intervenes, a law organizes the thinkable by (dual, irreconcilable; or mitigable, dialectical) oppositions. And all the couples of oppositions are couples.

Law | Opposition | Thought | Wisdom |

Joseph Cook

A natural law is a process, not a power: it is a method of operation, not an operator. A natural law, without God behind it, is no more than a glove without a hand in it.

God | Law | Method | Power | Wisdom | God |

Charles Darwin, fully Charles Robert Darwin

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life and from use and disuse: a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms, Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

Action | Beginning | Character | Death | Earth | Growth | Inheritance | Law | Life | Life | Nature | Object | Sense | Struggle | War | Wisdom |

Edward Coke, fully Sir Edward Coke

Reason is the life of the law; nay, the common law itself is nothing else but reason.

Law | Life | Life | Nothing | Reason | Wisdom |

Albert Einstein

Unless the cause of peace based on law gathers behind it the force and zeal of a religion, it hardly can hope to succeed.

Cause | Force | Hope | Law | Peace | Religion | Wisdom | Zeal |

James "Jim" L. Foster

Retribution is one of the grand principles in the divine administration of human affairs; a requital is imperceptible only to the willfully unobservant. There is everywhere the working of the everlasting law of requital; man always gets as he gives.

Administration | Law | Man | Principles | Wisdom |

Euripedes NULL

There is nothing more hostile to a city than a tyrant, under whom in the first and chiefest place, there are not laws in common, but one man, keeping the law himself to himself, has the sway and this is no longer equal.

Law | Man | Nothing | Wisdom |

Felix Frankfurter

If facts are changing, law cannot be static.

Law | Wisdom |

George F Gilder

The central event of the twentieth century is the overthrow of matter. In technology, economics, and the politics of nations, wealth in the form of physical resources is steadily declining in value and significance. The powers of mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things.

Economics | Force | Mind | Nations | Politics | Technology | Wealth | Wisdom | Value |