William H. Seward Quotes

But there is a higher law than the Constitution, which regulates our authority over the domain, and devotes it to the same noble purposes.

No enactment of man can be considered law unless it conforms to the law of God.

That law is constitutional, and the Constitution authorizes nothing repugnant to the Divine law.

Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity.

There's laws that we must live by, and they're not the laws of man.

Man has made 32 million laws since the Commandments were handed down to Moses on Mount Sinai... but he has never improved on God's law.

Not a single time have we gotten a right from Congress or from the President. We get them from God.

But you answer, that the Constitution recognizes property in slaves. It would be sufficient, then, to reply, that this constitutional recognition must be void, because it is repugnant to the law of nature and of nations.

I just believe if you don't believe in God, then where is your moral barometer? That's just me talking. You can believe what you want to believe.

The Pledge clearly acknowledges the fact that our freedoms in this country come from God, not government.

The law of the Creator, which invests every human being with an inalienable title to freedom, cannot be repealed by any interior law which asserts that man is property.

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.

The Supreme Court recognizes no authority greater than itself. Not the Constitution. Not the Almighty.

Obey human laws that do not conflict with God's laws.

To this day there exists in the world in all classes of society a veritable revolt against Divine Law, the Moral Law, which they strive to eliminate from the education of its youth and government of its nations. Education without religion sooner or later marches to its doom

God and Liberty

There is but one law for all … the law of nature.

It was the general opinion of ancient nations, that the divinity alone was adequate to the important office of giving laws to men…. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service [creating the U. S. Constitution] had any interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the inspiration of heaven, any more than those at work upon ships or houses, or labouring in merchandize or agriculture: it will for ever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses.

All powers, all laws, are but the fair Embodied thoughts of God.

Our human laws are but the copies, more or less imperfect, of the eternal laws, so far as we can read them.

Laws are the silent assessors of God.

We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or galantry would break the strongest cords of our constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

It is often said by religious people that without its framework, there is no sense of right or wrong. My view is that religion comes after ethics.

We don't put the Ten Commandments in school anymore. We just neglect everything and people act like the Ten Commandments is something so terrible. I mean, it's a way to live. I think we all could agree on what they say.

A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of Saint Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law.