Human Laws Quotes & Sayings

We dare not invest so much in the kingdom of this world that we neglect our main task of introducing people to a different kind of kingdom, one based solely on God's grace and forgiveness. Passing laws to enforce morality serves a necessary function, to dam up evil, but it never solves human problems. — Philip Yancey

The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden-that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time. — C.S. Lewis

Freemasonry is founded on the immutable laws of Truth and Justice and its grand object is to promote the happiness of the human race. — George Washington

An osteopath is only a human engineer, who should understand all the laws governing his engine and thereby master disease. — Andrew Taylor Still

Crime is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today, economic, political, social, and moral, conspires to misdirect human energy into wrong channels; so long as most people are out of place doing the things they hate to do, living a life they loathe to live, crime will be inevitable, and all the laws on the statutes can only increase, but never do away with, crime. — Emma Goldman

Among the many worlds which man did not receive as a gift of nature, but which he created with his own mind, the world of books is the greatest. Every child, scrawling his first letters on his slate and attempting to read for the first time, in so doing, enters an artificial and complicated world; to know the laws and rules of this world completely and to practice them perfectly, no single human life is long enough. Without words, without writing, and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity. And if anyone wants to try to enclose in a small space in a single house or single room, the history of the human spirit and to make it his own, he can only do this in the form of a collection of books. — Hermann Hesse

Today, the best way to communicate with someone is still face-to-face. Virtual reality has the potential to change that, to make it where VR communication is as good or better than face-to-face communications, because not only do you get all the same human cues as real-world communication, you basically suspend the laws of physics, you can do whatever you want, you can be wherever you want. — Palmer Luckey

In his Dialogue "Timaeus" Plato had a demiurge to create the globe-shaped world according to musical laws, including the human soul. Fifteen hundred years later, that still found an echo in the Renaissance. And in those days the architects realized that the musical harmonies had spatial expressions
namely, the relationships of the length of strings, and spatial relationships were precisely their only concerns. Because both the world and the body and soul were composed according to musical harmonies by the demiurge architect, both the macrocosm and the microcosm, they must therefore be guided in their own architectural designs by the laws of music. — Harry Mulisch

Those rights, then, which God and nature have established, and are therefore called natural rights, such as life and liberty, need not the aid of human laws to be more effectually invested in every man than they are; neither do they receive any additional strength when declared by the municipal laws to be inviolate. On the contrary, no human legislature has power to abridge or destroy them, unless the owner shall himself commit some act that amounts to a forfeiture. — William Blackstone

Democracy comes naturally to him who is habituated normally to yield willing obedience to all laws, human or divine. — Mahatma Gandhi

It would be hard to point out any error more truly subversive of all the order and beauty, all the peace and happiness, of human society than the position that the body of men have a right to make what laws they please; or that laws can derive any authority from their institution merely and independent of the quality of the subject-matter. No arguments of policy, reason of state, or preservation of the constitution can be pleaded in favor of such a practice. They may in deed impeach the frame of that constitution; but can never touch this immovable principle. This seems to be, indeed, the principle which Hobbes broached in the last century, and which was then so frequently and so ably refuted. — Edmund Burke

Why are the Jews hated? It is the inevitable result of their laws; they either have to conquer everybody or be hated by the whole human race ... — Voltaire

The laws and conditions of the production of wealth partake of the character of physical truths. There is nothing optional or arbitrary in them ... It is not so with the Distribution of Wealth. That is a matter of human institution solely. The things once there, mankind, individually or collectively, can do with them as they like. — John Stuart Mill

Human nature was smothered by society; healthy instincts were smothered by laws. They were training us to be assembly-line robots; that's why they lined the school desks up in rows and trained kids to respond to opening and closing bells. The monotonous human assembly line squelched the life out of individual experience. — Dave Cullen

Isaac Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics"
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. — Isaac Asimov

Historians are not scientists. They cannot (and should not even trying to) establish universal laws of social or political "physics" with reliable predictive powers. Why? Because there is no possibility of repeating the single, multi-millennium experiment that constant to the past. The sample size of human history is one. — Niall Ferguson

Australianism' means single-minded determination to win - to win within the laws but, if necessary, to the last limit within them. It means where the 'impossible' is within the realm of what the human body can do, there are Australians who believe that they can do it - and who have succeeded often enough to make us wonder if anything is impossible to them. It means they have never lost a match - particularly a Test match - until the last run is scored or their last wicket down. — John Arlott

Humans become human through intense learning not just of survival skills but of customs and social mores, kinship and social laws-that is, culture. — Richard Leakey

It's one of the most basic laws of human nature, isn't it? The more we are denied something, the more we want it. The more silence given to this or that topic, the more power. — Jill McCorkle

So the life of a philosopher extends widely: he is not confined by the same boundary as are others. He alone is free from the laws that limit the human race, and all ages serve him as though he were a god. — Seneca.

To deal with these problems - of world population and hunger, of peace, of energy and mineral resources, of environmental pollution, of poverty - we must broaden and deepen our knowledge of nature's laws, and we must broaden and deepen our understanding of the laws of human behavior. — Herbert A. Simon

Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws - always for other fellow. A murky part of us, something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up. — Robert A. Heinlein

Those who object to human rights protection laws typically do so because they want to be above those laws. — Christina Engela

There are superior, spiritual laws inherent in human nature — Sunday Adelaja

Though reason must guide us in laying down standards and laws regarding animals, and in examining the arguments of those who reject such standards, it is usually best in any moral inquiry to start with the original motivation, which in the case of animals we may without embarrassment call love. Human beings love animals as only the higher love the lower, the knowing love the innocent, and the strong love the vulnerable. When we wince at the suffering of animals, that feeling speaks well of us even when we ignore it, and those who dismiss love for our fellow creatures as mere sentimentality overlook a good and important part of our humanity. — Matthew Scully

I ask: which of the two, civil or natural life, is more likely to become insufferable to those who live it? We see about us practically no people who do not complain about their existence; many even deprive themselves of it to the extent they are able, and the combination of divine and human laws is hardly enough to stop this disorder. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings. — Franklin D. Roosevelt

[Christianity] existed and flourishes, not only without the support of human laws, but in spite of every opposition from them. — James Madison

Our weapons are the ironic mind against the literal: the open mind against the credulous; the courageous pursuit of truth against the fearful and abject forces who would set limits to investigation (and who stupidly claim that we already have all the truth we need). Perhaps above all, we affirm life over the cults of death and human sacrifice and are afraid, not of inevitable death, but rather of a human life that is cramped and distorted by the pathetic need to offer mindless adulation, or the dismal belief that the laws of nature respond to wailings and incantations. — Christopher Hitchens

All human beings, by virtue of having been born into this world, are immortal beings - not our material bodies; those are sadly quite fragile, inasmuch as they are bound by the laws of matter and time. The spirit, however, is indestructible. It obeys different laws. — Stephen R. Lawhead

Deep within the human constitution lie written laws of nature that should guide man in the conduct of his life. — Herbert M. Shelton

And I feel certain there must be a second set of laws, inscrutable but real, that governs exactly how much a particular individual can give to and receive from another. Some hydrology of human generosity. Because there are these gifts we can make to one another freely, reflexively, with no sting of loss; and there are gifts we fight to relinquish, beg to get. — Karen Russell

Most of what happens in the world is just a consequence of natural, universal laws- laws that apply everywhere and to everything, with no special exemptions or amplifications for your benefit- given variety by the input of chance. Everything that you as a human being consider cosmically important is an accident. — PZ Myers

Humanity smacks me the taste of human psyche and prejudice, being part of human nature. Humans believe that they have a right to decide on behalf of all creatures and make laws for them. Love is more preferred word to replace humanity, it incorporates feelings of all creatures in comparison to humanity, which is only humane. — Tarif Naaz

It is strangely absurd to suppose that a million of human beings, collected together, are not under the same moral laws which bind each of them separately. — Thomas Jefferson

In this age of space flight when we use the modern tools of science to advance into new regions of human activity, the Bible ... remains in every way an up to date book. Our knowledge and use of the laws of nature that enable us to fly to the moon, also enable us to destroy our home planet with the atom bomb. Science itself does not address the question whether we should use the power at our disposal for good or for evil. The guidelines of what we ought to do are furnished in the moral Law of God. — Wernher Von Braun

The scientific revolution proved that there are objective, discernible laws of physical phenomena. Take gravity, for instance. You don't exactly have faith in the law of gravity so much as you just know that the law is the law. Now we are learning that there are objective, discernible laws of non-physical phenomena. These two sets of laws are parallel. Externally, the universe supports our physical survival. Photosynthesis in plants and plankton in the ocean produce oxygen, which we need in order to breathe. Internally the universe also supports our survival. Emotionally and psychologically the internal equivalent to oxygen, what we need in order to survive, is love. And human relationships exist to produce love. — Marianne Williamson

Mathematics is universal. It's discovered by human beings, but the rules of mathematics are the same throughout the universe and the laws of the universe. — Paul Davies

Laws must be efficaciously deterrent in nature, and in grave offences where offenders trespass the precincts of being a human, and commit crimes against even babies/infants/children; solely for beastly gratification, deserve no mercy. — Henrietta Newton Martin Legal Consultant

Every faculty that naturally belongs to the human mind is latent in every mind, and it can be awakened and developed, provided the proper laws are faithfully applied. — Christian D. Larson

We, however, want to become those we are
human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves. To that end we must become the best learners and discoverers of everything that is lawful and necessary in the world: we must become physicists in order to be able to be creators in this sense
while hitherto all valuations and ideals have been based on ignorance of physics or were constructed so as to contradict it. Therefore: long live physics! And even more so that which compels us to turn to physics
our honesty! — Friedrich Nietzsche

It is the responsibility of each human being today to choose between the force of darkness and the force of light. We must therefore transform our attitudes, and adopt a renewed respect for the superior laws of Divine Nature. — Maurice Strong

Laws and conditions that tend to debase human personality - a God-given force - be they brought by the State or individuals, must be relentlessly opposed in the spirit of defiance shown by St. Peter when he said to the rulers of his day: 'Shall we obey God or man?' — Albert Lutuli

Meeks was telling him about the value of work. He said that it had been his personal experience that if you wanted to get ahead, you had to work. He said this was the law of life and it was no way to get around it because it was inscribed on the human heart like love thy neighbour. He said these two laws were the team that worked together to make the world go round and that any individual who wanted to be a success and win the pursuit of happiness, that was all he needed to know. — Flannery O'Connor

With a generous endowment of motherhood provided by legislation, with all laws against voluntary motherhood and education in its methods repealed, with the feminist ideal of education accepted in home and school, and with all special barriers removed in every field of human activity, there is no reason why woman should not become almost a human thing. It will be time enough then to consider whether she has a soul. — Crystal Eastman

Civilization, comprising all the achievements of art and science, technology and industry, is the result of man's invention and manipulation of symbols - of words, letters, numbers, formulas and concepts, and of such social institutions as universally accepted clocks and rulers, scales and timetables, schedules and laws. By these means, we measure, predict, and control the behavior of the human and natural worlds - and with such startling apparent success that the trick goes to our heads. All too easily, we confuse the world as we symbolize it with the world as it is. — Alan W. Watts

Someone with a low degree of epistemic arrogance is not too visible, like a shy person at a cocktail party. We are not predisposed to respect humble people, those who try to suspend judgement. Now contemplate epistemic humility. Think of someone heavily introspective, tortured by the awareness of his own ignorance. He lacks the courage of the idiot, yet has the rare guts to say "I don't know." He does not mind looking like a fool or, worse, an ignoramus. He hesitates, he will not commit, and he agonizes over the consequences of being wrong. He introspects, introspects, and introspects until he reaches physical and nervous exhaustion.
This does not necessarily mean he lacks confidence, only that he holds his own knowledge to be suspect. I will call such a person an epistemocrat; the province where the laws are structured with this kind of human fallibility in mind I will can an epistemocracy. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

From the dawn of civilization, human beings have tried to find out order in the chaotic world surrounding them. It has however never been easy to find a solution to explain a given system while being a part of that system. The best bet is to find out the most fundamental components within the system and building a theory round these. In other words, a theory that is able to describe the world in totality has to keep the number of basic postulates it depends upon to zero or near zero. — Subhajit Ganguly

When ... we, as individuals, obey laws that direct us to behave for the welfare of the community as a whole, we are indirectly helping to promote the pursuit of happiness by our fellow human beings. — Aristotle.

I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions ... but I know also that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. ... — Jon Meacham

Science, as I pointed out in the previous chapter, is flexible and nondogmatic. It sticks to facts and to reality (which always can change) and to logical thinking (which does not contradict itself and hold two opposite views at the same time). But it also avoids rigid all-or-none and either/or thinking and sees that reality is often two sided and includes contradictory events and characteristics. Thus, in my relations with you, I am not a totally good person or a bad person but a person who sometimes treats you well and sometimes treats you badly. Instead of viewing world events in a rigid, absolute way, science assumes that such events, and especially human affairs, usually follow the laws of probability. — Albert Ellis

To suffer destructive consequences is to obey laws in human nature — Sunday Adelaja

Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal. — Arthur C. Clarke

The greatest riddle of all ... the riddle of man! The complex mystery of the universal human being as he stands wihtin the threshold of universal laws. This is the most fascinating puzzle! — Adriana Koulias

It is the triumph of civilization that at last communities have obtained such a mastery over natural laws that they drive and control them. The winds, the water, electricity, all aliens that in their wild form were dangerous, are now controlled by human will, and are made useful servants. — Henry Ward Beecher

Laws have never been able to change human nature, and only God can change hearts. — Siri Mitchell

When our laws tell people that what lies behind the thin wall of a women's abdomen during pregnancy is not a human being and that the destiny of a preborn child lies with the private conscience of the mother, we are essentially telling society that life itself is not important enough to be called an inalienable right. If life itself is not the most fundamental of all rights, then what is? — Bob Dornan

I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and Constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors. — Thomas Jefferson

I think that metaphor really is a key to explaining thought and language. The human mind comes equipped with an ability to penetrate the cladding of sensory appearance and discern the abstract construction underneath - not always on demand, and not infallibly, but often enough and insightfully enough to shape the human condition. Our powers of analogy allow us to apply ancient neural structures to newfound subject matter, to discover hidden laws and systems in nature, and not least, to amplify the expressive power of language itself. — Steven Pinker

The supreme God that we serve has the final say in all matters. There is no higher law and there is no greater power. Hebrews 6:13 states, "He could swear by none greater, so He swore by himself." Since God has a supreme status, When the ideas of man conflict with the laws of God, the ideas of man are doomed. When the concepts of false teachings purvey useless information, they may flounder and flop around on the canvass of human curiosity for some time, but when they rear their ugly head against God's law they are on a collision course with extinction. ~ From the book Supremacy Clause by Pastor Myers — David Myers

All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State ... For Truth is the unity of the universal and subjective will; and the Universal is to be found in the State, in its laws, its universal and rational arrangements. The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth. We have in it, therefore, the object of history in a more definite shape than before; that in which Freedom obtains objectivity. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Those who are truly alive are kindly and unsuspecting in their human relationships and consequently endangered under present conditions. They assume that others think and act generously, kindly and helpfully, in accordance with the laws of life. This natural attitude, fundamental to healthy children as well as primitive man, inevitably represents a great danger in the struggle for a rational way of life as long as the emotional plague subsists, because the plague-ridden impute their own manner of thinking and acting to their fellow men. A kindly man believes that all men are kindly, while one infected with the plague believes that all men lie and cheat and are hungry for power. In such a situation, the living are at an obvious disadvantage. When they give to the plague-ridden they are sucked dry, then ridiculed or betrayed. — Wilhelm Reich

It is certain that the only hope of retroductive reasoning ever reaching the truth is that there may be some natural tendency toward an agreement between the ideas which suggest themselves to the human mind and those which are concerned in the laws of nature. — Charles Sanders Peirce

What sparks wars? The will to power, the backbone of human nature. The threat of violence, the fear of violence, or actual violence, is the instrument of this dreadful will. You can see the will to power in bedrooms, kitchens, factories, unions and the borders of states. Listen to this and remember it. The nation state is merely human nature inflated to monstrous proportions. QED, nations are entities whose laws are written by violence. Thus it ever was, so ever shall it be. — David Mitchell

The object of pure physics is the unfolding of the laws of the intelligible world; the object of pure mathematics that of unfolding the laws of human intelligence. — James Joseph Sylvester

Horace once told me that laws were powerless against the private passions of the human heart, and only he who has no power over it, such as the poet or the philosopher, may persuade the human spirit to virtue. — John Williams

My feeling is religious insofar as I am imbued with the consciousness of the insufficiency of the human mind to understand more deeply the harmony of the Universe which we try to formulate as "laws of nature". — Albert Einstein

Doesn't there, in fact, exist something that is dearer to almost every man than his own very best interests, or - not to violate logic - some best good ... which is more important and higher than any other good, and for the sake of which man is prepared if necessary to go against all the laws, against, that is, reason, honour, peace and quiet, prosperity - in short against all those fine and advantageous things - only to attain that primary, best good which is dearer to him than all else? — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

And this accident came about ... ?Through nature's unpredictability not man's incapacity. No errors were committed in our maneuvers. Nevertheless, we can't prevent a loss of balance from taking its toll. One may defy human laws, but no one can withstand the laws of nature. — Jules Verne

What led me to my science and what fascinated me from a young age was the, by no means self-evident, fact that our laws of thought agree with the regularities found in the succession of impressions we receive from the external world, that it is thus possible for the human being to gain enlightenment regarding these regularities by means of pure thought — Max Planck

God in his harmony has equal ends
For cedar that resists and reed that bends;
For good it is a woman sometimes rules,
Holds in her hand the power, and manners, schools,
And laws, and mind; succeeding master proud,
With gentle voice and smiles she leads the crowd,
The somber human troop. — Victor Hugo

Sometimes I forget this insoluble mess and dream: he'll save me, we'll travel; we'll hunt in the deserts, we'll sleep on the pavements of strange cities, carelessly, without his guilt, without my pain. Or else I'm going to wake up and all the human laws and customs of this world will have changed - thanks to some magical power - or this world, without changing, will let me feel desire and be happy and carefree.
What did I want from him who hurt me more than I thought it was possible for two people to hurt each other? I wanted the adventures found in kids' books. He couldn't give me these because he wasn't able to. Whatever did he want from me? I never understood. He told me he was just average: average regrets, average hopes. What do I care about all that average shit that has nothing to do with adventure? — Kathy Acker

Just across from Bismarck stood Fort Lincoln where friends and relatives of Custer's dead cavalrymen still lived, and these emigrating Sioux could perceive such bitterness in the air that one Indian on the leading boat displayed a white flag. Yet, in accordance with the laws of human behavior, the farther downstream they traveled the less hostility they encountered, and when the tiny armada reached Standing Rock near the present border of South Dakota these Indians were welcomed as celebrities. Men, women and children crowded aboard the General Sherman to shake hands with Sitting Bull. Judson Elliot Walker, who was just then finishing a book on Custer's campaigns, had to stand on a chair to catch a glimpse of the medicine man and reports that he was wearing "green wire goggles." No details are provided, so green wire goggles must have been a familiar sight in those days. Sitting Bull mobbed by fans while wearing green wire goggles. It sounds like Hollywood. — Evan S. Connell

She answered: please believe me, what has happened in my family is not what you think. I can say only this - that everything I learned about human decency I learned here. I learned nothing from you except how to be suspicious. I didn't know what hate was until I lived among you and saw you hating every day. They even had to pass laws to keep you from hating. I despise your quick answers, your slogans in the subways, and most of all I despise your lack of good manners: you'll never have 'em as long as you exist. — Harper Lee

This is one of man's oldest riddles. How can the independence of human volition be harmonized with the fact that we are integral parts of a universe which is subject to the rigid order of nature's laws? — Max Planck

All my originality consists?in giving life in human fashion to beings which are impossible according to the laws of possibility. — Odilon Redon

If we believe in an all-powerful God, then we must then believe that God gave us this Earth, and we must in turn believe that God gave us its laws of gravity, of chemistry, of physics. We must also believe that God gave us our human powers of intellect and reason. — Sheldon Whitehouse

All of my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and emotions have no validity or significance in the cosmos-at-large. — H.P. Lovecraft

All things are sold: the very light of heaven is venal; earth's unsparing gifts of love, the smallest and most despicable things that lurk in the abysses of the deep, all objects of our life, even life itself, and the poor pittance which the laws allow of liberty, the fellowship of man, those duties which his heart of human love should urge him to perform instinctively, are bought and sold as in a public mart of not disguising selfishness, that sets on each its price, the stamp-mark of her reign. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

In the cause of expedience and the quest for information, man has always been willing to trump his laws and betray his beliefs to legitimize the torture of those who do not share them. — Mark Allen Smith

When I say that someone is being treated like a criminal, I mean that person is being treated like he broke the law or otherwise did something wrong. (When I want to say someone is being treated as less than human, I say that person is being treated like an animal, not a criminal.) Her chattel slavery and Jim Crow analogies are similarly tortured and yet another effort to explain away stark racial differences in criminality. But unlike prisons, those institutions punished people for being black, not for misbehaving. (A slave who never broke the law remained a slave.) Yet Alexander insists that we blame police and prosecutors and drug laws and societal failures - anything except individual behavior - and even urges the reader to reject the notion of black free will. — Jason L. Riley

God uses means. Natural laws and human ingenuity are his tools, even when we do not see his hand. He didn't just establish these laws and then step away. As contemporary science reminds us, apparent chaos is ubiquitous. Things should fall apart, but they don't. Not for one moment could the cosmos sustain itself apart from the Father's loving word, which he speaks in his Son and by his Spirit. — Michael S. Horton

All my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. — H.P. Lovecraft

Mythology was not about theology, in the modern sense, but about human experience. People thought that gods, humans, animals and nature were inextricably bound up together, subject to the same laws, and composed of the same divine substance. There — Karen Armstrong

Another way in which religion betrays itself, and attempts to escape mere reliance on faith and instead offer "evidence" in the sense normally understood, is by the argument from revelation. On certain very special occasions, it is asserted, the divine will was made known by direct contact with randomly selected human beings, who were supposedly vouchsafed unalterable laws that could then be passed on to those less favored. — Christopher Hitchens

As an engineer, I understood that the natural world operated according to fixed laws. Through my studies, I came to realize that there were, likewise, laws that govern human wellbeing. It seemed to me that these laws are fundamental not only to the wellbeing of societies, but also to the miniature societies of organizations. Indeed, that is what we found when we began to apply these principles systematically at Koch Industries. Through our observation of how they could create prosperity in an organization, I began to systematize my beliefs into Market-Based Management. — Charles Koch

These metaphysic rights entering into common life, like rays of light which pierce into a dense medium, are, by the laws of nature, refracted from their straight line. Indeed in the gross and complicated mass of human passions and concerns, the primitive rights of men undergo such a variety of refractions and reflections, that it becomes absurd to talk of them as if they continued in the simplicity of their original direction. The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity: and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable to man's nature, or to the quality of his affairs. When I hear the simplicity of contrivance aimed at and boasted of in any new political constitutions, I am at no loss to decide that the artificers are grossly ignorant of their trade, or totally negligent of their duty. — Edmund Burke

In science, law is not a rule imposed from without, but an expression of an intrinsic process. The laws of the lawgiver are impotent beside the laws of human nature, as to his disillusion many a lawgiver has discovered. — Clifford Allbutt

threats and promises often succeed in creating stable human hierarchies and mass-cooperation networks, as long as people believe that they reflect the inevitable laws of nature or the divine commands of God, rather than just human whims. — Yuval Noah Harari

Plants or animals rarely behave in an unnatural manner that's contrary to their true makeup. Human beings are also natural beings, but at the same time, we're conscious entities. We therefore have free will and must make the choice not merely to be part of nature, but also to follow faithfully the laws of nature. — H.E. Davey

Science is not, as so many seem to think, something apart, which has to do with telescopes, retorts, and test-tubes, and especially with nasty smells, but it is a way of searching out by observation, trial and classification; whether the phenomena investigated be the outcome of human activities, or of the more direct workings of nature's laws. Its methods admit of nothing untidy or slip-shod; its keynote is accuracy and its goal is truth. — Archibald E. Garrod

It is disastrous to own more of anything than you can possess, and it is one of the most fundamental laws of human nature that our power actually to possess is limited. — Joseph Wood Krutch

Human nature, though being the product of historical evolution, has certain inherent mechanisms and laws, to discover which is the task of psychology. — Erich Fromm

Indeed we may consider the engine as the material and mechanical representative of analysis, and that our actual working powers in this department of human study will be enabled more effectually than heretofore to keep pace with our theoretical knowledge of its principles and laws, through the complete control which the engine gives us over the executive manipulation of algebraical and numerical symbols. — Ada Lovelace

History lessons remind us that the states in which we live, their institutions, even their laws, have come to us through conflict, often of the most bloodthirsty sort. Our daily diet of news brings us reports of the shedding of blood, often in regions quite close to our homelands, in circumstances that deny our conception of cultural normality altogether. We succeed, all the same, in consigning the lessons both of history and of reportage to a special and separate category of "otherness" which invalidate our expectations of how our own world will be tomorrow and the day after not at all. Our institutions and our laws, we tell ourselves, have set the human potentiality for violence about with such restraints that violence in everyday life will be punished as criminal by our laws, while its use by our institutions of state will take the particular form of "civilised warfare. — Steven Pinker

We are persons whose bodies can be objectively studied according to the impersonal laws of physics but whose minds are subjectively experienced in ways science has not yet been able to fathom. In short, by radically seperating science from religion, we are not merely segregating two human institutions; we are fragmenting ourselves as individuals and as a society in ways that lead to deep, unresolved conflicts in terms of our view of the world, our values, and our way of life. — B. Alan Wallace

For decades, the Arab states have seemed exceptions to the laws of politics and human nature. While liberty expanded in many parts of the globe, these nations were left behind, their 'freedom deficit' signaling the political underdevelopment that accompanied many other economic and social maladies. — Elliott Abrams

There are principles that govern human effectiveness - natural laws in the human dimension that are just as real, just as unchanging and unarguably there as laws such as gravity are in the physical dimension. — Stephen Covey

As a race, the African is inferior to the white man. Subordination to the white man is his normal condition. He is not his equal by nature and cannot be made so by human laws or human institutions. Our system, therefore, so far as regards this inferior race, rests upon this great immutable law of nature. — Alexander H. Stephens

Culture is not trivial. It is not a decoration or artifice, the songs we sing or even the prayers we chant. It is a blanket of comfort that gives meaning to lives. It is a body of knowledge that allows the individual to make sense out of the infinite sensations of consciousness, to find meaning and order in a universe that ultimately has neither. Culture is a body of laws and traditions, a moral and ethical code that insulates a people from the barbaric heart that lies just beneath the surface of all human societies and indeed all human beings. Culture alone allows us to reach, as Abraham Lincoln said, for the better angels of our nature. — Wade Davis