Right of way

“ In such case no person would turn either to the right hand or to the left, in consequence of the motives, the sayings, or the doings of this one or that one; but they would march straightforward in the path that leads to eternal life; and if others stepped out of the way, they would walk straight along. ”

“ The angels elevate their right hands, as before, in benediction; one bears a processional cross; another, who approaches the closed entrance of the chapel, bears the thurible, and seems prepared to knock against the door, and cry aloud, according to the impressive ancient ritual of the Latin church, "Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors, that the King of Glory may come in!" A third angel bears the cross-staff, and raises the aspergillum, or hyssop, as if about to sprinkle with holy water the newly completed edifice ”

“ but even without help I wish and hope to fulfil them. Blame me! I myself do that, but blame me, and not the road by which I go, and which I point out to those that ask me where, in my opinion, the road is. If I know the road home, and go along it intoxicated, staggering from side to side, does that make it any the less the true way by which I go? If it is not the right way, show me another; ”

“ Imagine the same branch having made up its vegetable mind that it could live its own life apart from the vine, twisting its various fibres into all kinds of knots and snarls, according to its own idea of living, so that the sap from the main stem could only reach it in a minimum quantity. What a dearth of leaf, flower, and fruit would appear in the branch! Yet the figure is perfectly illustrative of the way in which most of us are interfering with the best use of the life that is ours.
Freedom is obedience to law. A bridge can be built to stand, only in obedience to the laws of mechanics. ”

“ The natural tendency to counterbalance the change of equilibrium produced by the act of raising and moving rapidly the right arm, would bring the left heel towards the horse's flank. It seems, however, improbable, that for such a cause of trivial convenience alone, a person of knightly condition, in the thirteenth century, would have worn a single spur, or have been thus equipped, when laid in his grave, at a period when the spurs formed one of the most important parts of knightly attire. ”

“ Brougham, that the left heel only was found armed with a spur, is deserving of attention, the fact having been carefully verified, and a notion has been entertained that this was in conformity with some peculiar established usage. It is obvious that if any weight be carried on the right arm, or any violent movement made therewith, as for instance, in wielding a lance or other weapon, it would be easier to spur with the left than the right heel. ”

“ In forming a grave in Hereford cathedral, in 1836, a place of sepulture was brought to light, containing human remains, clothed in vestments which had been richly embroidered; at the right side lay a small chalice and paten of white metal, and on the paten were two pieces of wax taper, the wicks partly consumed, placed in the form of a cross. This singular circumstance seemed to indicate a practice, analogous, in some measure, to the deposit of the waxen sigillum, according to the ancient Custumal above mentioned, cited by Martene [28] . ”

“ Under the right arm had been deposited an iron plough-share, and the other objects found in the grave were a fragment of fictile manufacture, resembling the handle of an amphora, a fine single-edged weapon, in excellent preservation, with the remains of its scabbard, a dagger, buckle, and a comb formed of bone. ”

“ The increase of right is an increase of duty. We come to many cross-ways, phantom roads perchance, and we imagine that we see the finger of conscience pointing each one of them out to us. Which shall we take? ”

“ Man’s conduct is to be estimated by the light which he has. They who sin without law, are to be judged without law; and [4, P] they who sin in the law, are to be judged by the law. Your father might have been engaged in the traffic in ardent spirits. Whether he was innocent or not, is not now the question, and has been determined by a higher tribunal than any on earth. The question now is, whether you can pursue it with a good conscience; or whether, with all that you know of the effects of the traffic, it be right or wrong for you to pursue it. ”

“ The incised slab which served to cover this grave was well known to the family as the "Crusader's Tomb." It is of red sand-stone, nearly seven feet long, three feet five inches wide, and about six inches thick. It has cut upon its surface a cross flory, with a smaller cross within it; at the right side is a sword, at the left a circular shield. The date of this incised slab may be considered as of the twelfth century. ”

“ Let us reinforce, by word, deed, and example, the values that make law and order possible: personal responsibility, respect for others, and the fundamental sense of decency that comes from knowing the difference between right and wrong. ”

“ I believe in law and order; but I believe, as a condition precedent, that law and order should be predicated upon right and justice, pure and simple. Law is, intrinsically, a written expression of justice; if, on the contrary, it becomes instead written injustice, men are not, strictly speaking, bound to yield it obedience. ”

“ The law itself, the Eternal Right, for right's own sake, that alone must be our motive, the spring of our resolution, the ground of our obedience. Deep from our inmost souls comes forth the mandate, the bare and simple law claiming the command of our whole existence merely by its proper right, and disdaining alike to menace or to bribe. ”

“ Such have always been, and such must always be, the consequences of a want of this right of all men to share in the making of the laws, a right, as I have before shown, derived immediately from the law of Nature, springing up out of the same source with civil society, and cherished in the heart of man by reason and by experience. ”

“ Outside this law, however, as spokes to the Wheel, are the innumerable radiations of human laws and conditions, so that one may scarcely obey the primary command of his nature if he would, and often loses sight of it as the principle upon which his destiny is revolving. ”

“ That is a matter of individual taste and temperament; one loves contention more, and the other peace; from the standpoint of law both conclusions are to be equally respected; for the law leaves to every one who has a legal right, the choice of asserting his right or of surrendering it. ”

“ For the essence of legal right is, as I have frequently remarked already, action. What the air is to the flame, freedom of action is to the feeling of legal right. Refuse it this freedom, and the feeling dies. ”

“ The point before us is not why we are under obligation to do a right act, but why the act is right. Manifestly the rightness of the proposed action is the ground of the obligation to do it; that is, the obligation is grounded on the right. ”

“ So, with equal scope, another simple law, the law of right, which binds the individual, binds also two or three when gathered together, binds conventions and congregations of men, binds villages, towns, and cities, binds states, nations, and races, clasps the whole human family in its embrace, and binds in self-imposed bonds, a just and omnipotent God. ”

“ He believes, for instance, that it is the lawful, nay more! in America, that it is the constitutional right of the citizen to buy the national highways, and, having bought them, to use them as a common carrier might use a horse and cart upon a public road. ”

“ By the judicious application of words and logic we have learnt what uses can be made of the law of the land, and though our reason may convince us and our conscience too, that right is right and wrong is wrong, yet, the law's the law for all that, and we are Justices of the Peace and must respect the law and abide by it. ”

“ Movement takes its species from the term whereunto. Hence it belongs to legal justice to direct to the common good those matters which concern private individuals: whereas on the contrary it belongs to particular justice to direct the common good to particular individuals by way of distribution. ”

“ But if such pay obedience to the same commands and authorities, then are they even much more obedient to this supernal allotment, this divine mind and all-powerful God. So that this universal world is to be considered one commonwealth of gods and men.” “Law is the supreme reason, implanted in nature, which commands all things that are to be done, and prohibits their contraries.” “The radical idea of right I derive from nature, under whose guidance we have to draw out the whole of this subject-matter.” ”

“ I will fly to our fellow-citizens in the Southern States; I will on my knees conjure them, in the name of humanity, to abolish a traffic which causes it to bleed in every pore. If they are deaf to the pleadings of Nature, I will conjure them, for the sake of consistency, to cease to deprive their fellow-creatures of freedom, which their writers, their orators, Representatives, Senators, and even their Constitutions of Government, have declared to be the unalienable birthright of man. ”

“ We have inquired what it is in the nature of man that renders him capable of these rights, what are the moral ends to which the rights are relative, and in what form the rights should be realised in order to the attainment of these ends. In order to make the inquiry into rights complete, we ought to go on to examine in the same way the rights which arise out of the establishment of a state, the rights connected with the several functions of government ”

“ But this fearless assertion of the rights of conscience necessarily involved the right to sit in judgment upon all human laws and the powers that ordained them, and to determine for themselves whether the law was lawful. ”

“ Throughout the controversy as to free will that has been carried on among English psychologists this is the way in which the question has been commonly dealt with. The freedom, claimed or denied for the will, has been claimed or denied for it irrespectively of those objects willed, on the nature of which the goodness or badness of the will depends. ”

“ For the use of laws, which are but rules authorized, is not to bind the people from all voluntary actions; but to direct and keep them in such a motion, as not to hurt themselves by their own impetuous desires, rashness or indiscretion; as hedges are set, not to stop travellers, but to keep them in their way. ”

“ So it is when men are governed by laws and works, the laws not being regulated according to the people. The case is that of the driver who would regulate the road by the movements of the wagon. True, the road is often well suited to the straight course of the wagon. ”

“ But, good or bad, as laws in this country are merely the expression of the people’s will, they should be respected as long as they remain laws. For law is just as necessary to the human race as is the air we breathe or the food we eat. ”

“ Meanwhile, the hum of conversation grew louder around him, and opinion ran high on the subject of "the right of the road."
"The roads are made for the people, sure-ly!" said one of a group of men standing near the largest table in the room—"And the people 'as the right to 'xpect safety to life an' limb when they uses 'em." ”

“ It was a fair exemplification of a tendency which is woven into the make of our being. Tell the average mortal that it is wrong to walk on the left side of the road, and in nine cases out of ten he will conclude that the proper thing must be to walk on the right side of the road; whereas in actual life, and in almost all opinions, moral, political, and religious, the proper thing is to walk neither on the left nor the right side, but somewhere about the middle. Say to the ship-master, You are to sail through a perilous strait; you will have the raging Scylla on one hand as you go. ”

“ Between the straight, broad avenues of conduct, well lighted and well defined, there lay apparently whole regions of byways, in which those who could not easily do right could wander vaguely, without precisely doing wrong, following a line that might be termed permissible. ”

“ In vain do we seek freedom under the power of the laws. The laws! Where is there any law? Where is there any respect for law? Under the name of law you have everywhere seen the rule of self-interest and human passion. But the eternal laws of nature and of order exist. ”

“ And it will be long before social discipline has so far modified human character that reverence for law, as rooted in the moral order of things, will serve in place of reverence for the power which enforces law. ”

“ RIGHT ACTION is absolutely conformed to law. Why, therefore, should not the secret of nature's invariableness be, not passiveness, but rightness?' The unchanging uniformity of Nature's course proves her holiness—her willing, unvarying obedience to the Divine law. ”

“ Recognizing those two transcendent ordinances of God, the Law of Right and the Law of Love,—twin suns which illumine the moral universe,—why not aspire to the true glory, and, what is higher than glory, the great good, of taking the lead in the disarming of the nations? ”

“ If any wrong requires you to redress it, I shall order this son of mine and as many of our men as you may ask for, to place themselves at your disposal. From the moment of their going forth with you, and until they return, your word shall be their law, but at other times they shall be free to live within the mountains as they are wont. ”

“ In the one case it presents love of the right as right; in the other a love of the more agreeable consequences of right. Unquestionably, indeed, a desire of the better consequences is a proper motive for choices. ”

“ In saying this, I mean only to designate the general spirit of human law. Every principle, on its application to practice, must be limited and modified by circumstances; our reason by our common sense. ”

“ Away with those whose aim it is to “fulfil the law by means of many observances.” “The law is to be observed not because we must keep it, but because we choose to do so, not because it is necessary, but because it is permitted. ”