Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 11 of the published version of James Coolidge Carter’s brilliant speech delivered on July 25th, 1889, to the annual meeting of the Virginia State Bar Association – a speech titled The Provinces of the Written and the Unwritten Law:

All systems of law, therefore, are marked by the peculiar traits which distinguish the character of the nations by which they are framed. No standards of justice can be upheld in any nation which its people cannot comprehend and be willing to enforce. None will satisfy it which is not fairly on a level with its existing state of moral and intellectual progress.

DBx: One among many implications of this reality is that what Thomas Sowell calls “the quest for cosmic justice” is – as Sowell argues – the quest of dangerous fools.