Bernard Berenson Quotes

Good laws derive from evil habits.

It's very much simpler to get rid of any written rule you choose than it is an item of customary morality... while laws are preserved on tablets of wood or stone, customary morality is engraved deep in our living souls

We find the people to be no better than their laws.

Every so often, we pass laws repealing human nature.

Laws and customs may be creative of vice; and should be therefore perpetually under process of observation and correction: but laws and customs cannot be creative of virtue: they may encourage and help to preserve it; but they cannot originate it.

You can't legislate morality.

We can't legislate human nature.

No tendency is quite so strong in human nature as the desire to lay down rules of conduct for other people.

Laws are often made to express collective ethical principles, to establish a climate of opinion …

A theme I'm obsessed with is the tension between human nature and the frameworks designed to curb the worst and promote the best of it.

The best laws cannot make a constitution work in spite of morals; morals can turn the worst laws to advantage.

You can't go around hoping that most people have sterling moral characters. The most you can hope for is that people will pretend that they do.

Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad.

The passions of men are in themselves no sin. No more are the actions that proceed from those passions until they know that a law forbids them, which till laws be made, they cannot know.

You must legislate morality.

[America] is so awash in rights that we are virtually unable to pass legislation reflecting traditional religious and moral views. Moral relativism will then be the rule, at law; and what is true at law will shape what is practiced.

Morality is a social necessity

In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.

Whoever takes it upon himself a commonwealth and prescribe laws must presuppose all men naturally bad, and that they will yield to their innate evil passions as often as they can do so with safety.

Laws and customs may be creative of vice; and should be therefore perpetually under process of observation and correction.

Much legislation is moral legislation because it conditions the action and the thought of the nation in broad and important spheres of life.

All laws which can be broken without any injury to another, are counted but a laughing-stock, and are so far from bridling the desires and lusts of men, that on the contrary they stimulate them.

The permissive society has been allowed to become a dirty phrase. A better phrase is the civilized society.

One of the things that is so important, critical I think, in reading not just the founders but thousands of years as you put it, that discussion about corruption, is that you can't talk about the problem of corruption without talking about human nature.

Laws and rules of conduct are for the state of childhood; education is an emancipation.