Richard Snyder Quotes

There are two sides to reconciliation; the law aspect and the moral values. Unless there is improvement for both, changes will not come by easily

You cannot legislate an attitude.

We have traditions, attitudes, an attachment to social welfare and even if change is desirable, we won’t accept change overnight.

The power of a movement lies in the fact that it can indeed change the habits of people. This change is not the result of force but of dedication, of moral persuasion.

Culture is a product of law. And laws create norms for society. This is why anyone who wants to change the culture of a country must try to change the norms of the country.

Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.

The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.

In America nothing dies easier than tradition.

Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.

You do what you think is right and let the law catch up.

We are really living in a culturally, post-Christian nation. The fundamental norms Christians have long been able to depend upon no longer exist.

... legislating to regulate cultural change is like lassoing a locomotive with a cobweb.

Human society can only adapt to social change at a certain rate.

Some things are easier to legalize than to make legitimate.

Too often reform involves the mechanics of change rather than the underlying values.

Courts should ... follow, rather than lead, changes taking place elsewhere in society.

Sometimes, when a tide starts to sweep, it makes no difference what the traditions are.

You just never know when today's cultural outcasts will become tomorrow's cultural icons.

We … need education in the obvious – to learn to transcend our own convictions and to leave room for much that we hold dear to be done away with short of revolution by the orderly change of law.

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

Laws never would be improved, if there were not numerous persons whose moral sentiments are better than the existing laws.

There are, in every society, rules of conduct, and practices of life, which the progress of events has gradually marked out, and general observance hallowed. Of these, some are founded on the principles of morality and religion, some on caprice, some on prejudice. The breaking of any of them is always esteemed a crime against society.

Whoever imitates a people is one of them.

We have really made an advance in civilization, that the principles on which our political and social order rest are in harmony with the laws of the universe, that we have set up an ideal which may never in genuine happiness certain...We are getting rid of old world things and becoming accustomed to the new. We are forming new creeds, new judgments, new manners; we are becoming a new race of men.

Custom is petrification; nothing but dynamite can dislodge it for a century.