Natural Law Quotes

I told her how many things on earth have a fixed colour. Let us say, the green leaves. In our eyes, a red or a yellow leaf is beautiful. Even better if the leaf is shaded in several hues. So we paint the yellows and reds in our paintings oftener. And we forget the ordinary green, the best in nature.

~ Anuradha Bhattacharyya

If you are for gun control, then you are not against guns, because the guns will be needed to disarm people. So it’s not that you are anti-gun. You’ll need the police’s guns to take away other people’s guns. So you’re very pro-gun; you just believe that only the Government (which is, of course, so reliable, honest, moral and virtuous…) should be allowed to have guns. There is no such thing as gun control. There is only centralizing gun ownership in the hands of a small political elite and their minions.

~ Stefan Molyneux

Why not say that the meaning and purpose of the sexual powers is pleasure? Certainly sex is pleasurable, but there is nothing distinctive about that. In various ways and degrees, the exercise of every voluntary power is pleasurable. It is pleasurable to eat, pleasurable to breath, even pleasurable to flex the muscles of the leg. The problem is that eating is pleasurable even if I am eating too much, breathing is pleasurable even if I am sniffing glue, flexing the muscles of the leg is pleasurable even if I am kicking the dog. For a criterion of when it is good to enjoy each pleasure, one must look beyond the fact that it is a pleasure. Consider an analogy between sex and eating. The purpose of eating is to take in nutrition, but eating is pleasurable, so suppose that we were to say that the purpose of eating is pleasure, too. Then it would seem that any way of eating that gives pleasure is good, whether it is suitable for nutrition or not. Certain ancient Romans are said to have thought this way. To prolong the pleasure of their feasts, they purged between courses. I hope it is not difficult to recognize that such behavior is disordered. The more general point I am trying to make is that although we find pleasure in exercising our sexual powers, pleasure is not their purpose; it only provides a motive for using these powers, and a dangerous one, too, which may at times conflict with their true purposes and steer us wrong. Besides, to think of pleasure as the purpose of intercourse is to treat our bodies merely as tools for sending agreeable sensations to our minds. They are of inestimably greater dignity than that, for they are part of what we are.

~ J. Budziszewski

The first objection is that it is rubbish to talk about natural meanings and purposes, because we merely imagine such things. According to the objector's way of thinking, meanings and purposes aren't natural—they aren't really in the things themselves—they are merely in the eye of the beholder. But is this true? Take the lungs, for example. When we say that their purpose is to oxygenate the blood, are we just making that up? Of course not. The purpose of oxygenation isn't in the eye of the beholder; it's in the design of the lungs themselves. There is no reason for us to have lungs apart from it. Suppose a young man is more interested in using his lungs to get high by sniffing glue. What would you think of me if I said, “That's interesting—I guess the purpose of my lungs is to oxygenate my blood, but the purpose of his lungs is to get high?” You'd think me a fool, and rightly so. By sniffing glue, he doesn't change the purpose built into his lungs, he only violates it. We can ascertain the purposes of the other features of our design in the same way. The purpose of the eyes is to see, the purpose of the heart is to pump blood, the purpose of the thumb is to oppose the fingers so as to grasp, the purpose of the capacity for anger is to protect endangered goods, and so on. If we can ascertain the meanings and purposes of all those other powers, there is no reason to think that we cannot ascertain the meanings and purposes of the sexual powers. Natural function and personal meaning are not alien to each other. They are connected. In a rightly ordered way of thinking, they turn out to be different angles of vision on the same thing.The second objection is that it doesn't make any difference even if we can ascertain the meanings or purposes of the sexual powers, because an is does not imply an ought. This dogma too is false. If the purpose of eyes is to see, then eyes that see well are good eyes, and eyes that see poorly are poor ones. Given their purpose, this is what it means for eyes to be good. Moreover, good is to be pursued; the appropriateness of pursuing it is what it means for anything to be good. Therefore, the appropriate thing to do with poor eyes is try to turn them into good ones. If it really were impossible to derive an ought from the is of the human design, then the practice of medicine would make no sense. Neither would the practice of health education. Consider the young glue-sniffer again. How should we advise him? Is the purpose of his lungs irrelevant? Should we say to him, “Sniff all you want, because an is does not imply an ought”? Of course not; we should advise him to kick the habit. We ought to respect the is of our design. Nothing in us should be put into action in a way that flouts its inbuilt meanings and purposes.

~ J. Budziszewski

Incorrect radiation levels may be able to affect your sex drive and it may be proven in the future that human sex drive is governed more by radiation types and levels than any other factor, even more so than hormones! Generally, a feeling of contentment replaces sexual desire in natural radiation environments.

~ Steven Magee

Two ideas are opposed — not concepts or abstractions, but Ideas which were in the blood of men before they were formulated by the minds of men. The Resurgence of Authority stands opposed to the Rule of Money; Order to Social Chaos, Hierarchy to Equality, socio-economico-political Stability to constant Flux; glad assumption of Duties to whining for Rights; Socialism to Capitalism, ethically, economically, politically; the Rebirth of Religion to Materialism; Fertility to Sterility; the spirit of Heroism to the spirit of Trade; the principle of Responsibility to Parliamentarism; the idea of Polarity of Man and Woman to Feminism; the idea of the individual task to the ideal of ‘happiness’; Discipline to Propaganda-compulsion; the higher unities of family, society, State to social atomism; Marriage to the Communistic ideal of free love; economic self-sufficiency to senseless trade as an end in itself; the inner imperative to Rationalism.

~ Francis Parker Yockey

Justice is the alignment of societal laws with natural Law, and the righting of wrongs. Justice creates liberty. Justice maintains the character of love and can be said to be a product of right actions by a society. Things that are right promote the well-being of individual selves and societies. What is right can be said to always be just. If a society commits to justice by aligning societal laws with natural Law and respecting the rights of natural Law, then it will promote love through liberty.

~ C W Newman

In the same way, filling a cavity restores to the tooth its natural function of chewing. Healing does not transcend our nature; it respects it.

~ J. Budziszewski

Collectivism is the philosophy of every cockroach and sewer rat: If I want it, I must need it, and if I need it, I have a right to it, and if I have a right to it, it doesn't matter what I have to do to get it. Thefact that such an inherently animalistic, short-sighted, anti-humanviewpoint is now painted by some as compassionate and progressive does not make it any more sane, or any less dangerous.

~ Larken Rose

No, free will is not an 'extra'; it is part and parcel of the very essence of consciousness. A conscious being without free will is simply a metaphysical absurdity.

~ Raymond M. Smullyan

A conscious being without free will is simply a metaphysical absurdity.

~ Raymond M. Smullyan

Those are just platitudes. Everyone has his own idea of playing fair. Does he? Try making up your own idea of what's fair--say, giving the greatest rewards to the laziest workers--and see how seriously people take you.

~ J. Budziszewski

The law says you have the right to hold a nigger, but begging the law's pardon, it lies. . . Is everything right because the law allows it? Suppose they'd pass a law taking away your liberty and making you a slave?

~ Solomon Northup

The human skin evolved in a natural electromagnetic radiation environment and is now in a very unnatural man-made one that is making many people sick.

~ Steven Magee

Any species that devours its natural environment will eventually fall victim to the resulting silence and I call the toxicity of silence: Extinction Silence

~ Steven Magee

Your inner natural flow of life connects you with the natural flow of life that takes place in the universe.

~ Roshan Sharma

A libertarian is somebody who believes, of course, in personal liberty. And liberty is a personal thing; it is not collective. You don’t gain liberty because you belong to a group. So we don’t talk about women’s rights or gay rights or anything else. Everybody has an absolute equal right as an individual, and it comes to them naturally.

~ Ron Paul

No one can take away your Natural Rights, but they can do great damage making you think they can.

~ J.s.b. Morse

What I have called the internal morality of law is in this sense a procedural version of natural law, though to avoid misunderstanding the word procedural should be assigned a special and expanded sense so that it would include, for example, a substantive accord between official action and enacted law. The term procedural is, however, broadly appropriate as indicating that we are concerned, not with the substantive aims of legal rules, but with the ways in which a system of rules for governing human conduct must be constructed and administered if it is to be efficacious and at the same time remain what it purports to be.

~ Lon L. Fuller

Their quarry had been cornered in his defenses and their bloodlust was such that they were likely to pay top Julep to watch him escape, so that he might be brutalized and killed before their very eyes, as this was much more gratifying to them than simply watching justice be enacted. They, too, understood that societal constructs for justice were moderate gratification, at best, as they were empty and subject to contradictions and compromises steeped in moral relativism and an unconditional dependence upon overblown semantics that made the law a mockery of itself. As for the ideologies that these hollow systems of jurisprudence sought to define and uphold: these could easily be subjugated through a meticulous analysis of the trivial components of one statute or another. The rule of law had failed them. What the people wanted, in its stead, was rather simple: moral absolutes. Good versus evil. And evil was not to be simply prevailed over. Evil was to be dominated and effectively eliminated, because as long as it was able to while away the time somewhere—in some sweaty prison cell, far away, staring out the barred window with a wry smile, as it plotted its next offensive on the Common Good, a sense of wholeness could not be achieved.

~ Ashim Shanker

That is how sin works. Having nothing in itself by which to convince, on what other resources but good and truth can it draw to make itself attractive and plausible? We must use the natural law to recognize the abuse of the natural law; there is nothing else to use.

~ J. Budziszewski

Perhaps the saddest part of coexistence is the concept of interdependence being necessary for any form of solidarity to be realized. Being encouraged to lean on the weak, does not sound like a long term viable solution to attaining strength.

~ Justin K. Mcfarlane Beau

Nowadays the job of the judge is not to do justice. The judge is more of a functionary . He's like a civil servant whose job is to interpret words written down by another branch of the government, whether those words are just or not.

~ Stephan Kinsella

The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom.

~ John Locke

Our legal system does not grant adults a right to liberty, because they already possess that right; it only revokes the right to liberty (for certain offenses) or restores it (if the deprivation did not conform to due process).

~ Thomas Szasz

To refuse any bond of union between man and civil society, on the one hand, and God the Creator and consequently the supreme Law-giver, on the other, is plainly repugnant to the nature, not only of man, but of all created things; for, of necessity, all effects must in some proper way be connected with their cause; and it belongs to the perfection of every nature to contain itself within that sphere and grade which the order of nature has assigned to it, namely, that the lower should be subject and obedient to the higher.

~ Pope Leo Xiii

She watched with morbid fascination as they gathered at the stumps at the ends of the man's wrists, the old scar tissue the only place on him unclaimed by Fener, but the paths the sprites took to those stumps touched not a single tattooed line. The flies dance a dance of avoidance - but for all that, they were eager to dance.

~ Steven Erikson

The rules of the universe that we think we know are buried deep in our processes of perception.

~ Gregory Bateson

The Enlightenment may have made its most lasting impact in the way we live and think today through its social history. Our institutions and laws, our conception of the state, and our political sensitivity all stem from Enlightenment ideas… Remarkably enough, at the center of these ideas stands the age-old concept of natural law. Much if the Enlightenment’s innovation in in political theory may be traced to a change in the interpretation of that concept.

~ Louis Dupré

The natural law is an instrument for progress, not a weapon of revolution.

~ Russell Kirk

Ordinary human laws are the means -- however imperfect -- by which we express our understanding of the enduring moral law.

~ Russell Kirk

The attempt to understand morality in the legalistic terms of a natural law is ancient but is now mostly associated with the formulation given it by Thomas Aquinas in the late thirteenth century. All earlier natural law is commonly seen as leading up to Aquinas’s paradigmatic version, whereas later natural law is understood as deriving from it.

~ Knud Haakonsen

When you push someone's head under water for 5 minutes, they will drown. It doesn't matter if the person is a sinner or a saint. It's just a natural process. If their head is under water, the lack of oxygen will make them drown. That rule applies to everyone, good or bad, equally. It doesn't matter if the drowning person has strong moral fiber.And it doesn't matter if you're a good or a bad person, once you become addicted to drugs. What happens next is inevitable. It's a natural process that happens in everyone's brain, once the drugs take over. So don't ever fool yourself into thinking that only weak or bad people get addicted.

~ Oliver Markus

It was not that donors had no loyalty to each other, but they were not ashamed to betray a fellow donor. In its wisdom the Alliance promulgated the moral rules—the main one being one’s duty to the Alliance. The Alliance was sacred—all else secondary. But not all donors—or citizens—bought into that. Many knew in their hearts there was more to life.

~ Cate Campbell Beatty

If anthropological data suggests something short of the ideal, that is not because nothing is universal, but because two universals are in conflict: universal moral knowledge and universal desire to evade it. The first one we owe to our creation. The second we owe to our fall.

~ J. Budziszewski

Human Rights calls for responsible behavior on the part of every individual being, and the society at large. As entwined portion of rights, duties follow, thereby it calls for performance of duties such as practicing nonviolence, solving conflicts with a dialogue, respect for the other individual or a nation, respect for human rights of other individuals etc

~ Hafiz

..Thus it can be said that ‘Human Rights’ is an ever expanding subject, which grows in leaps and bounds with the evolution of knowledge, development of the society and the advancement of the world at large, thereby encompassing within its ambit newer forms of right/s as and when recognized as an inalienable ‘right’ , along with wrapped-in duties; duties, on the part of the state, the government, the human rights organizations on one hand, and duties incumbent on individuals as responsible beings owing their allegiance to the society, the society itself , and the world at large on the other...

~ Henrietta Newton Martin