William Howard Taft Quotes

There are some good rules and there are some lousy rules.

All laws are an attempt to domesticate the natural ferocity of the species.

Against human nature one cannot legislate.

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

Any fool can make a rule And any fool will mind it.

You can't legislate morality.

No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

That man is a creature who needs order yet yearns for change is the creative contradiction at the heart of the laws which structure his conformity and define his deviancy.

Morality is a social necessity

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

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.

Casting judgments is an integral feature of what makes us human.

You have to adhere to a certain morality, a certain level of decorum, or else you'll be punished and labeled.

Most conduct is guided by norms rather than by laws. Norms are voluntary and are effective because they are enforced by peer pressure.

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

Morality represents for everybody a thoroughly definite and ascertained idea: the idea of human conduct regulated in a certain manner.

When I was in high school, I had a notebook that I filled up with rules about lying. It must have been a hundred pages long - one hundred pages of rules about lying!

There will always be a rule. There will be people who break the rules. There will be consequences. We fundamentally think these things will be true for a time. The question becomes, What are the consequences? Who enforces the consequences? What are the worst consequences?

Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organisation that anything decent can be got out of him.

The morality we all grew up with and are accustomed to is what feels right.

Humans are the only ones who are the custodians of other people's morals.

Nature is seldom in the wrong, custom always.

The attempt to regulate, control, and prescribe all manner of conduct and social relations is very old. It was always the practice of primitive peoples.

Moral philosophy is nothing else but the science of what is good, and evil, in the conversation, and society of mankind. Good, and evil, are names that signify our appetites, and aversions; which in different tempers, customs, and doctrines of men, are different.