Laws, religions, creeds, and systems of ethics, instead of making society better than its best unit, make it worse than its average unit, because they are never up to date.
Poets should be law-givers; that is, the boldest lyric inspiration should not chide and insult, but should announce and lead the civil code, and the day's work.
Of course politics is an interesting and engrossing thing. It offers no immutable laws, nearly always prevaricates, but as far asblather and sharpening the mind go, it provides inexhaustible material.
Not until he acquires European manners does the American anarchist become the gentleman who assures you that people cannot be mademoral by Act of Parliament (the truth being that it is only by Acts of Parliament that men in large communities can be made moral, even when they want to).
I'm a filmmaker, I'm a storyteller, an entertainer, if you will, so what can I do to participate? Well, I'm not a scientist; I'm not an expert on environmental law; I'm a guy that can tell stories. So I always look for a way to communicate ideas and help to spread excitement for change.
Education is the constraining and directing of youth towards that right reason, which the law affirms, and which the experience of the best of our elders has agreed to be truly right.
The axioms of physics translate the laws of ethics. Thus, "the whole is greater than its part;" "reaction is equal to action;" "the smallest weight may be made to lift the greatest, the difference of weight being compensated by time;" and many the like propositions, which have an ethical as well as physical sense. These propositions have a much more extensive and universal sense when applied to human life, than when confined to technical use.
Nature knows nothing but solid bodies; your science deals only with combinations of surfaces. And so nature constantly gives the lie to all your laws; can you name one to which no fact makes an exception?
The law courts must appear as a threatening gesture toward secret vice. The bank must declare: here your money is secure and well looked after by honest people.