No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
Interpretation
Unwritten traditions and societal norms often hold more power than formal laws.
This quote highlights the idea that the expectations and customs of a society can be more influential and authoritative than any legal statutes. While laws are codified rules meant to govern behavior, it is the unwritten rules, shaped by culture and public sentiment, that frequently dictate actions and interactions within a community.
In practice
During a discussion on social behaviors in a community meeting.
Everybody counts in applying democracy. And there will never be a true democracy until every responsible and law-abiding adult in it, without regard to race, sex, color or creed has his or her own inalienable and unpurchasable voice in government.
Parliaments have stopped laughing at woman suffrage, and politicians have begun to dodge! It is the inevitable premonition of coming victory.
Roll up your sleeves, set your mind to making history, and wage such a fight for liberty that the whole world will respect our sex.
The answer to one is the answer to all. Government by 'the people' is expedient or it is not. If it is expedient, then obviously all the people must be included.
Just as the world war is no white man's war, but every man's war, so is the struggle for woman suffrage no white woman's struggle, but every woman's struggle.
One can generally say this about men: that they are ungrateful, fickle, simulators and deceivers, avoiders of danger, greedy for gain; and while you work for their good they are completely yours, offering you their blood, their property, their lives, and their sons when danger is far away; but when it comes nearer to you, they turn away.
Just to the extent that the Bible was appealed to in matters of science, science was retarded; and just to the extent that science has been appealed to in matters of religion, religion has advanced - so that now the object of intelligent religionists is to adopt a creed that will bear the test and criticism of science.
Privilege (to the privileged) means having private laws.
Suits are malevolent magicians' sleeves for socialists, full of patrician loops and tricks, small, embroidered, cryptic messages of deference and privilege. They are ever the uniform of the enemy. They are also the greatest British invention ever.
To place oneself in the position of God is painful: being God is equivalent to being tortured. For being God means that one is in harmony with all that is, including the worst. The existence of the worst evils is unimaginable unless God willed them.
As soon as a woman's primary social value could no longer be defined as the attainment of virtuous domesticity, the beauty myth redefined it as the attainment of virtuous beauty. It did so to substitute both a new consumer imperative and a new justification for economic unfairness in the workplace where the old ones had lost their hold over newly liberated women.
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