Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself.
James Anthony FroudeRead
Our human laws are but the copies, more or less imperfect, of the eternal laws, so far as we can read them.
Interpretation
Human laws attempt to reflect universal truths but are inherently flawed.
This quote suggests that the laws created by humans are mere approximations of the deeper, eternal laws that govern the universe. It implies that while we strive to establish justice and order through our laws, they are imperfect reflections of a higher moral truth that we can only partially understand.
In practice
In a philosophical debate about the nature of justice.
Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself.
If you think you can temper yourself into manliness by sitting here over your books, it is the very silliest fancy that ever tempted a young man to his ruin. You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one.
Who is to decide which is the grimmer sight: withered hearts, or empty skulls?
Scrape the surface of language, and you will behold interstellar space and the skin that encloses it.
The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means.
The more we study the major problems of our time, the more we come to realise that they cannot be understood in isolation. They are systemic problems, which means that they are interconnected and interdependent.
But to ask pity of our body is like discoursing in front of an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the tides, and with which we should be appalled to find ourselves condemned to live.
The other animals humans eat, use in science, hunt, trap, and exploit in a variety of ways, have a life of their own that is of importance to them apart from their utility to us. They are not only in the world, they are aware of it. What happens to them matters to them. Each has a life that fares better or worse for the one whose life it is.
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