The desire to serve the common good must without fail be a requisite of the soul, a necessity for personal happiness; if it issues... not from there, but from theoretical or other considerations, it is not at all the same thing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He was a tough, burly thick-headed gentleman, with a loud voice, a pompous manner, a tolerable command of sentences with no meanin...g in them, and, in short, every requisite for a very good member indeed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am less disposed to think of a West Point education as requisite for this business than I was at first. Good sense and energy ar...e the qualities required.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The great leading distinction between writing and speaking is, that more time is allowed for the one than the other, and hence dif...ferent faculties are required for, and different objects attained by each. He is properly the best speaker who can collect together the greatest number of apposite ideas at a moment's warning; he is properly the best writer who can give utterance to the greatest quantity of valuable knowledge in the course of his whole life. The chief requisite for the one, then, appears to be quickness and facility of perception--for the other, patience of soul and a power increasing with the difficulties it has to master. He cannot be denied to be an expert speaker, a lively companion, who is never at a loss for something to say on every occasion or subject that offers. He, by the same rule, will make a respectable writer who, by dint of study, can find out anything good to say upon any one point that has not yet been touched upon before, or who by asking for time, can give the most complete and comprehensive view of any question. The one must be done off-hand, at a single blow; the other can only be done by a repetition of blows, by having time to think and do better.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nothing can be more real, or concern us more, than our own sentiments of pleasure and uneasiness; and if these be favourable to vi...rtue and unfavourable to vice, no more can be requisite to the regulation of our conduct and behavior.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The application requisite to the duties of the office I hold [governor of Virginia] is so excessive, and the execution of them aft...er all so imperfect, that I have determined to retire from it at the close of the present campaign.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Great abilites are not requisite for an Historian; for in historical composition, all the greatest powers of the human mind are qu...iescent. He has facts ready to his hand; so there is no exercise of invention. Imagination is not required in any degree; only about as much as is used in the lowest kinds of poetry. Some penetration, accuracy, and colouring, will fit a man for the task, if he can give the application which is necessary.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What then is the relation of law to morality? Law cannot prescribe morality, it can prescribe only external actions and therefore ...it should prescribe only those actions whose mere fulfillment, from whatever motive, the state adjudges to be conducive to welfare. What actions are these? Obviously such actions as promote the physical and social conditions requisite for the expression and development of free--or moral--personality.... Law does not and cannot cover all the ground of morality. To turn all moral obligations into legal obligations would be to destroy morality. Happily it is impossible. No code of law can envisage the myriad changing situations that determine moral obligations. Moreover, there must be one legal code for all, but moral codes vary as much as the individual characters of which they are the expression. To legislate against the moral codes of one's fellows is a very grave act, requiring for its justification the most indubitable and universally admitted of social gains, for it is to steal their moral codes, to suppress their characters.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »