Conscientious and careful physicians allocate causes of disease to natural laws, while the ablest scientists go back to medicine for their first principles.
The main foundations of every state, new states as well as ancient or composite ones, are good laws and good arms you cannot have good laws without good arms, and where there are good arms, good laws inevitably follow.
My position concerning God is that of an agnostic. I am convinced that a vivid consciousness of the primary importance of moral principles for the betterment and ennoblement of life does not need the idea of a law-giver, especially a law-giver who works on the basis of reward and punishment.
We don't talk about sources and methods. Don't talk about ongoing intelligence operations. I know there's speculation. But it's important for the American people to understand that I will use my powers to protect us, and I will do so under the law, and that's important for our citizens to understand.
Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice. Society is a living organism and must obey the laws of life, not of mechanics; it must develop. All that progressives ask or desire is permission-in an era when 'development,' 'evolution,' is the scientific word-to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine.
Whoever has overthrown an existing law of custom has always first been accounted a bad man: but when, as did happen, the law could not afterwards be reinstated and this fact was accepted, the predicate gradually changed; - history treats almost exclusively of these bad men who subsequently became good men!
All these constructions and the laws connecting them can be arrived at by the principle of looking for the mathematically simplest concepts and the link between them.
When a man is guided by the principles of reciprocity and consciousness, he is not far from the moral law. Whatever you don't wish for yourself don't do unto others.
It would not be possible for Noah to do in our day what he was permitted to do in his own ... The inspector would come and examine the Ark, and make all sorts of objections.
He in whom the love of truth predominates . . . submits to the inconvenience of suspense and imperfect opinion; but he is a candidate for truth . . . and respects the highest law of his being.