Quotes by Lawyers - Page 30

Theology is a superstition—Humanity a religion.
Robert G. Ingersoll
To believe in the things you can see and touch is no belief at all - but to believe in the unseen is a triumph and a blessing.
Abraham Lincoln
Can we believe that the real God, if there is one, ever ordered a man to be killed simply for making hair oil, or ointment? We are told in the thirtieth chapter of Exodus, that the Lord commanded Moses to take myrrh, cinnamon, sweet calamus, cassia, and olive oil, and make a holy ointment for the purpose of anointing the tabernacle, tables, candlesticks and other utensils, as well as Aaron and his sons; saying, at the same time, that whosoever compounded any like it, or whoever put any of it on a stranger, should be put to death. In the same chapter, the Lord furnishes Moses with a recipe for making a perfume, saying, that whoever should make any which smelled like it, should be cut off from his people. This, to me, sounds so unreasonable that I cannot believe it. Why should an infinite God care whether mankind made ointments and perfumes like his or not? Why should the Creator of all things threaten to kill a priest who approached his altar without having washed his hands and feet? These commandments and these penalties would disgrace the vainest tyrant that ever sat, by chance, upon a throne.
Robert G. Ingersoll
The fact that it is sometimes difficult for me to believe in God doesn't mean that I deny his existence. If I stopped believing in him, I wouldn't be able to continue living.
Rafael Ábalos
There has never been upon the earth a generation of free men and women. It is not yet time to write a creed. Wait until the chains are broken—until dungeons are not regarded as temples. Wait until solemnity is not mistaken for wisdom—until mental cowardice ceases to be known as reverence. Wait until the living are considered the equals of the dead—until the cradle takes precedence of the coffin. Wait until what we know can be spoken without regard to what others may believe. Wait until teachers take the place of preachers—until followers become investigators. Wait until the world is free before you write a
Robert G. Ingersoll
A lot of people don't believe in curses.A lot of people don't believe in yellow-spotted lizards either, but if one bites you, it doesn't make a difference whether you believe in it or not.
Louis Sachar
I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.
Gerry Spence
Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm.
Abraham Lincoln
To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest.
Mahatma Gandhi
What was I supposed to do then I wondered. Was there even a supposed-to for this kind of situation? A situation when when I looked at my receding past everything seemed retrospectively marked by an extreme order and predictability yet all moments since seemed to obey, and promised to continue obeying, their own set of stochastic, undisclosed, and undiscoverable laws. Where I was fully aware of the pitfalls and folly of a finely-tuned narcissism but still the known universe seemed to bend and bend inexorably inward and towards me where it awaited my next move, supremely ready to react accordingly. And how I knew that decisions I would soon make or defer would have near-Sophoclean import and yet nonetheless it all seemed oddly irrelevant.
Sergio de la Pava
Europe is equal to its historical task. Against the anti-spiritual, anti-heroic 'ideals' of America-Jewry, Europe pits its metaphysical ideas, its faith in its Destiny, its ethical principles, its heroism. Fearlessly, Europe falls in for battle, knowing it is armed with the mightiest weapon ever forged by History: the superpersonal Destiny of the European organism. Our European Mission is to create the Culture-State-Nation-Imperium of the West, and thereby we shall perform such deeds, accomplish such works, and so transform our world that our distant posterity, when they behold the remains of our buildings and ramparts, will tell their grandchildren that on the soil of Europe once dwelt a tribe of gods.
Francis Parker Yockey
The future depends on what we do in the present.
Mahatma Gandhi
Pakistan not only means freedom and independence but the Muslim Ideology which has to be preserved, which has come to us as a precious gift and treasure and which, we hope other will share with us.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah
Is it true that man was once perfectly pure and innocent, and that he became degenerate by disobedience? No. The real truth is, and the history of man shows, that he has advanced. Events, like the pendulum of a clock have swung forward and backward, but after all, man, like the hands, has gone steadily on. Man is growing grander. He is not degenerating. Nations and individuals fail and die, and make room for higher forms. The intellectual horizon of the world widens as the centuries pass. Ideals grow grander and purer; the difference between justice and mercy becomes less and less; liberty enlarges, and love intensifies as the years sweep on. The ages of force and fear, of cruelty and wrong, are behind us and the real Eden is beyond. It is said that a desire for knowledge lost us the Eden of the past; but whether that is true or not, it will certainly give us the Eden of the future.
Robert G. Ingersoll
There is no mystery to happiness.Unhappy men are all alike. Some wound they suffered long ago, some wish denied, some blow to pride, some kindling spark of love put out by scorn- or worse, indifference- cleaves to them, or they to it, and so they live each day within a shroud of yesterdays. The happy man does not look back. He doesn't look ahead. He lives in the present. But there's the rub. The present can never deliver one thing: meaning. The ways of happiness and meaning are not the same. To find happiness, a man need only live in the moment; he need only live for the moment. But if he wants meaning- the meaning of his dreams, his secrets, his life- a man must reinhabit his past, however dark, and live for the future, however uncertain. Thus nature dangles happiness and meaning before us all, insisting only that we choose between them. For myself, I have always chosen meaning.
Jed Rubenfeld
You will need seed money, so begin saving for your book. Don’t give up. Also, write down the ideas that you have right away so you don’t lose them.
Soraya Diase Coffelt
It matters, because everything we sayOf the past is description without place, a castOf the imagination, made in sound;And because what we say of the future must portend,Be alive with its own seemings, seeming to beLike rubies reddened by rubies reddening.
Wallace Stevens
Always remember that the future comes one day at a time.
Dean Acheson
The past is to be respected and acknowledged, but not worshipped; it is our future in which we will find our greatness.
Pierre Trudeau
The future depends on what you do today.
Mahatma Gandhi
If you haven't failed you haven't tried anything new...
Reshma Saujani
Walking’s a great way to create. The ideas seem to fall from the sky sometimes, and the fresh air is great too.
Kenneth Eade
I am growing old enough not to care much for the MANNER of doing things.
Abraham Lincoln
We live in a world where value of creativity is measured by commercial success, and copyrights are mere instruments of financial benefit, not creative progress
Kalyan C. Kankanala
Who's to know what makes a bird wake up and decide to change its song? It was written that our world would change and it changed.
Eliot Pattison
​The destiny of nations depends upon the manner in which they feed themselves.
Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
You always have a choice. Destiny deals you your hand and what you do with the cards is up to you
Kenneth Eade
Destiny deals you your hand and what you do with the cards is up to you.
Kenneth Eade
Imagine a computer. The monitor, keyboard, and processor are the hardware. Without any software to run it, your computer would be worthless. Your body is your hardware and your mindset is your operating system. It gives you access to the power of the hardware, and determines what software you can run. It lets you get the most out of your computer, allowing you to balance your checkbook and even create 3-D designs. Your mindset determines how you perceive and interact with the world.
Mike Cernovich
As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world - that is the myth of the atomic age - as in being able to remake ourselves.
Mahatma Gandhi
1. Who is a Death Warrior?Anyone can be a Death Warrior, not just someone who is terminally ill. We are all terminally ill. A Death Warrior accepts death and makes a commitment to live a certain way, whether it be for one year or thirty years.2. When does one become a Death Warrior?There is a specific moment during which you can decide to become a Death Warrior. That moment is when death shows you that you will die.3. How do you become a Death Warrior?Once you accept that life will end, you can become a Death Warrior by choosing to love life at all times and in all circumstances. You choose to love life by loving.4. What are the qualities of a Death Warrior?A Death Warrior is grateful for every second of time given and is aware of how precious each second is. Every second not spent loving is wasted. The Death Warrior's enemy is time that is wasted by not loving.5. Why should you become a Death Warrior?So you can live and die with truth and courage, and because life is too painful when you're wasteful with the time given to you.--The Death Warrior Manifesto, by DQ
Francisco X. Stork
At present, a good many men engaged in scientific pursuits, and who have signally failed in gaining recognition among their fellows, are endeavoring to make reputations among the churches by delivering weak and vapid lectures upon the 'harmony of Genesis and Geology.' Like all hypocrites, these men overstate the case to such a degree, and so turn and pervert facts and words that they succeed only in gaining the applause of other hypocrites like themselves. Among the great scientists they are regarded as generals regard sutlers who trade with both armies.Surely the time must come when the wealth of the world will not be wasted in the propagation of ignorant creeds and miraculous mistakes. The time must come when churches and cathedrals will be dedicated to the use of man; when minister and priest will deem the discoveries of the living of more importance than the errors of the dead; when the truths of Nature will outrank the 'sacred' falsehoods of the past, and when a single fact will outweigh all the miracles of Holy Writ.Who can over estimate the progress of the world if all the money wasted in superstition could be used to enlighten, elevate and civilize mankind?When every church becomes a school, every cathedral a university, every clergyman a teacher, and all their hearers brave and honest thinkers, then, and not until then, will the dream of poet, patriot, philanthropist and philosopher, become a real and blessed truth.
Robert G. Ingersoll
I want to do what little I can to make my country truly free, to broaden the intellectual horizon of our people, to destroy the prejudices born of ignorance and fear, to do away with the blind worship of the ignoble past, with the idea that all the great and good are dead, that the living are totally depraved, that all pleasures are sins, that sighs and groans are alone pleasing to God, that thought is dangerous, that intellectual courage is a crime, that cowardice is a virtue, that a certain belief is necessary to secure salvation, that to carry a cross in this world will give us a palm in the next, and that we must allow some priest to be the pilot of our souls.
Robert G. Ingersoll
He hurt everywhere, so at least he must be alive. Another comforting thought because, despite everything, he wanted to be alive. It was the business of living he wanted nothing to do with.
John Martel
Everyone, he continued, wants his life to stand for something other than what it would, which is about eighty years – in the West, at any rate – eighty years of working, eating, sleeping, shitting, breeding, and dying. Lives of buttoning and unbuttoning – who said that?
Zia Haider Rahman
Nothing could add to the horror of hell, except the presence of its creator, God. While I have life, as long as I draw breath, I shall deny with all my strength, and hate with every drop of my blood, this infinite lie.
Robert G. Ingersoll
In vain do we seek tranquility in the desert; temptations are always with us; our passions, represented by the demons, never let us alone: those monsters created by the heart, those illusions produced by the mind, those vain specters that are our errors and our lies always appear before us to seduce us; they attack us even in our fasting or our mortifications, in other words, in our very strength.
Montesquieu
... there is nothing stronger than a woman who has beaten her way back from being beaten down in the first place.
Barbara Lieberman
Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.
Mahatma Gandhi
Man often becomes what he believes himself to be. If I keep on saying to myself that I cannot do a certain thing, it is possible that I may end by really becoming incapable of doing it. On the contrary, if I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning.
Mahatma Gandhi
The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.
Mahatma Gandhi
Interior decorating is a rock-hard science compared to psychology practiced by amateurs.
Antonin Scalia
Death releases the energy into air. If a true catastrophe is looming, the disturbance becomes such that a sensitive individual may become highly troubled by it. He may be aware exactly when and where it will occur. He may see an aura around people who are soon to die. Or he may see images of the disaster beforehand...
Jed Rubenfeld
So I was just thinking about how something happened today and it was quite insightful, humbling and puts things into perspective. If you look at anything, everything has it's 'story' so to speak. For instance, for me to even write this status requires an obscene amount of processes (essentially limitless). Just the biological processes that have to take place are in the trillions. Then you add the technological component, the psychology behind it(self-awareness/consciousness). Then you start looking at the macro factors behind it which include how I came into existence, how life came to be for that to occur, how earth came to be, the sun, the solar system, the galaxy, universe...etc. So the odds for all those things to occur for me to write a simple (or not so simply) status like this....is pretty fucking incredible to say the least.
Michael R. Kitay
My good fortune is not that I've recovered from mental illness. I have not, nor will I ever. My good fortune lies in having found my life.
Elyn R. Saks
They wish to make a medical thing of evil. Madness is also such a useful metaphor, for that which we would rather not face...
Robert K. Tanenbaum
You don't want to think about it, but there's an ethical limit to what anyone should have to endure. You can't just negate that with sentimentality. With the idea of some indomitable spirit. That's a fairy tale. It's what people say about other people, to avoid the wretchedness. It's just cruelty by other means. Requiring a person to stay alive. For you.
Adam Haslett
What kills a person at twenty-five? Leukemia. An accident. But George knows the better odds are that someone who passes at that age dies of unhappiness. Drug overdose. Suicide. Reckless behavior.
Scott Turow
And if you learn only one thing from the ensuing maybe let it be this: the police were not merely interested observers who occasionally witnessed criminality and were then basically compelled to make an arrest, rather the police had the special ability to in effect create Crime by making an arrest almost whenever they wishes, so widespread was wrongdoing. Consequently, the decision on who would become a body was often affected by overlooked factors like the candidate's degree of humility, the neighborhood it lived in, and most often the relevant officers' need for overtime.
Sergio de la Pava
At first, I was shocked that Diane could even suggest this family reunion [on television], and then I realized this is just the way of the world, or at least the way of fin de siecle America. Not only would the next revolution be televised, but so would every other little stupid thing. It was already happening: Television reunions between adopted children and their birth parents...
Elizabeth Wurtzel
Many of the people who consented to talk about their private lives in front of millions of television viewers would say that they were sharing their stories as a way to give comfort [to] fellow sufferers, to raise public awareness, to give a voice to their pain. None of them would ever admit that it was all about ratings and voyeurism and lurid, grotesque curiosity.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
We should have a State in which we could live and breathe as free men and which we could develop according to our own lights and culture and where principles of Islamic social justice could find free play.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah
You have to stand guard over the development and maintenance of Islamic democracy, Islamic social justice and the equality of manhood in your own native soil.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah
Our civilization is not Christian. It does not come from the skies. It is not a result of "inspiration." It is the child of invention, of discovery, of applied knowledge -- that is to say, of science. When man becomes great and grand enough to admit that all have equal rights; when thought is untrammeled; when worship shall consist in doing useful things; when religion means the discharge of obligations to our fellow-men, then, and not until then, will the world be civilized.
Robert G. Ingersoll
Shoulder to shoulder, a coordinated movement of the people, their blood no longer confined in the limited circulation of the body but rolling sweetly and yet still returning through the infinite extent of China.
Franz Kafka
Every man is capable of doing good to another, but to contribute to the happiness of an entire society is to become akin to the gods
Montesquieu
And that’s the terrible myth of organized society. That everything that’s done through the established system is legal. And that word has a powerful psychological impact. It makes people believe that there is an order to life and an order to a system. And that a person who goes through this order and is convicted has gotten all that is due him and therefore society can turn its conscious off and look to other things and other times. And that’s the terrible thing about these past trials that they have this aura of legitimacy an aura of legality. I suspect that better men than the world has known and more of them have gone to their deaths through a legal system then through all the illegalities in the history of man. Six million people in Europe during the Third Reich, legal, Sacco and Vanzetti, quite legal, the Haymarket defendants, legal, the hundreds of rape trials throughout the south where black men were condemned to death all legal, Jesus legal, Socrates legal and that is the kaleidoscopic nature of what we live through here and in other places because all tyrants learn that it is far better to do this thing through some semblance of legality than to do it without that pretext.
William M. Kunstler
At present, the successful office-seeker is a good deal like the center of the earth; he weighs nothing himself, but draws everything else to him. There are so many societies, so many churches, so many isms, that it is almost impossible for an independent man to succeed in a political career. Candidates are forced to pretend that they are catholics with protestant proclivities, or christians with liberal tendencies, or temperance men who now and then take a glass of wine, or, that although not members of any church their wives are, and that they subscribe liberally to all. The result of all this is that we reward hypocrisy and elect men entirely destitute of real principle; and this will never change until the people become grand enough to allow each other to do their own thinking.Our government should be entirely and purely secular. The religious views of a candidate should be kept entirely out of sight. He should not be compelled to give his opinion as to the inspiration of the bible, the propriety of infant baptism, or the immaculate conception. All these things are private and personal. The people ought to be wise enough to select as their officers men who know something of political affairs, who comprehend the present greatness, and clearly perceive the future grandeur of our country. If we were in a storm at sea, with deck wave-washed and masts strained and bent with storm, and it was necessary to reef the top sail, we certainly would not ask the brave sailor who volunteered to go aloft, what his opinion was on the five points of Calvinism. Our government has nothing to do with religion. It is neither christian nor pagan; it is secular. But as long as the people persist in voting for or against men on account of their religious views, just so long will hypocrisy hold place and power. Just so long will the candidates crawl in the dust—hide their opinions, flatter those with whom they differ, pretend to agree with those whom they despise; and just so long will honest men be trampled under foot.
Robert G. Ingersoll
However, Gregor had become much calmer. All right, people did not understand his words any more, although they seemed clear enough to him, clearer than previously, perhaps because had gotten used to them
Franz Kafka
If there be such a principle as justice, or natural law, it is the principle, or law, that tells us what rights were given to every human being at his birth; what rights are, therefore, inherent in him as a human being, necessarily remain with him during life; and, however capable of being trampled upon, are incapable of being blotted out, extinguished, annihilated, or separated or eliminated from his nature as a human being, or deprived of their inherent authority or obligation.
Lysander Spooner