Quote

Laws and customs may be creative of vice and should be therefore perpetually under process of observation and correction: but laws and customs cannot be creative of virtue: they may encourage and help to preserve it but they cannot originate it.

Harriet Martineau

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Harriet Martineau
Age: 74 †
Born: 1802
Born: June 12
Died: 1876
Died: June 27
Economist
Essayist
Feminist
Historian
Journalist
Linguist
Novelist
Philosopher
Sociologist
Suffragist
Translator
Writer
Norwich
Norfolk
Virtue
Preserves
Creative
Encourage
Law
Vice
Originate
Help
Observation
Correction
Process
Vices
Perpetually
Helping
Lawyer
Corrections
Cannot
Laws
Preserve
May
Therefore
Customs

More quotes by Harriet Martineau

Image
It is characteristic of genius to be hopeful and aspiring.
Harriet Martineau
Image
For my own part, I had rather suffer any inconvenience from having to work occasionally in chambers and kitchenthan witness the subservience in which the menial class is held in Europe.
Harriet Martineau
Image
I saw no poor men, except a few intemperate ones. I saw some very poor women but God and man know that the time has not come for women to make their injuries even heard of.
Harriet Martineau
Image
Religion is a temper, not a pursuit. It is the moral atmosphere in which human beings are to live and move. Men do not live to breathe: they breathe to live.
Harriet Martineau
Image
influence which is given on the side of money is usually against truth.
Harriet Martineau
Image
While feeling far less injured by toil than my friends took for granted I must be, I yet was always aware of the strong probability that my life would end as the lives of hard literary workers usually end, - in paralysis, with months or years of imbecility.
Harriet Martineau
Image
There is no theory of a God, of an author of Nature, of an origin of the Universe, which is not utterly repugnant to my faculties. . .
Harriet Martineau
Image
The habit of dwelling on the past, has a narrowing as well as a debilitating influence. Behind us, there is a small, - an almost insignificant measure of time before us, there is an eternity. It is the natural tendency of the mind to magnify the one, and to diminish the other.
Harriet Martineau
Image
[On being deaf:] How much less pain there is in calmly estimating the enjoyments from which we must separate ourselves, of bravely saying, for once and for ever, 'Let them go,' than in feeling them waste and dwindle, till their very shadows escape from our grasp!
Harriet Martineau
Image
The last degree of honesty has always been, and is still considered incompatible with statesmanship. To hunger and thirst after righteousness has been naturally, as it were, supposed a disqualification for affairs.
Harriet Martineau
Image
[On being deaf:] We can never get beyond the necessity of keeping in full view the worst and the best that can be made of our lot. The worst is, either to sink under the trial, or to be made callous by it. The best is, to be as wise as is possible under a great disability, and as happy as is possible under a great privation.
Harriet Martineau
Image
If there is any country on earth where the course of true love may be expected to run smooth, it is America.
Harriet Martineau
Image
Happiness consists in the full employment of our faculties in some pursuit.
Harriet Martineau
Image
Scarcely anything that I observed in the United States caused me so much sorrow as the contemptuous estimate of the people entertained by those who were bowing the knee to be permitted to serve them.
Harriet Martineau
Image
The progression of emancipation of any class usually, if not always, takes place through the efforts of individuals of that class.
Harriet Martineau
Image
the systematic abuse with which the newspapers of one side assail every candidate coming forward on the other, is the cause of many honorable men, who have a regard to their reputation, being deterred from entering public life and of the people being thus deprived of some better servants than any they have.
Harriet Martineau
Image
it matters infinitely less what we do than what we are.
Harriet Martineau
Image
If the national mind of America be judged of by its legislation, it is of a very high order ... If the American nation be judged of by its literature, it may be pronounced to have no mind at all.
Harriet Martineau
Image
The last thing it [government] ought to do is to ground its proceedings on the ignorance of the people, - to yield them that which they will hereafter despise the donors for granting them.
Harriet Martineau
Image
. . . is it to be understood that the principles of the Declaration of Independence bear no relation to half of the human race?
Harriet Martineau