No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a certain degree. The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.
[Aucune société ne peut exister si le respect des Lois n’y règne à quelque degré ; mais le plus sûr, pour que les lois soient respectées, c’est qu’elles soient respectables. Quand la Loi et la Morale sont en contradiction, le citoyen se trouve dans la cruelle alternative ou de perdre la notion de Morale ou de perdre le respect de la Loi.]
Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850) French philosopher, economist, politician
The Law [La Loi] (1850) [tr. Russell]
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Quotations about:
respectability
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RESPECTABILITY, n. The social status of people whose sins haven’t quite caught up with them.
Edmund H. Volkart (1919-1992) American sociologist, researcher, editor
The Angel’s Dictionary: A Modern Tribute to Ambrose Bierce (1986)
Back in the nineteen-hundreds it was a wonderful experience for a boy to discover H. G. Wells. There you were, in a world of pedants, clergymen and golfers, with your future employers exhorting you to “get on or get out”, your parents systematically warping your sexual life, and your dull-witted schoolmasters sniggering over their Latin tags; and here was this wonderful man who could tell you about the inhabitants of the planets and the bottom of the sea, and who knew that the future was not going to be what respectable people imagined.
George Orwell (1903-1950) English writer [pseud. of Eric Arthur Blair]
“Wells, Hitler, and the World State,” Horizon (Aug 1941)
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The truth is, as every one knows, that the great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man — that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense — has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading.
H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
“The Blushful Mystery: Art and Sex,” Prejudices: First Series (1919)
Virtue has never been as respectable as money.
Mark Twain (1835-1910) American writer [pseud. of Samuel Clemens]
Innocents Abroad, ch. 55 (1869)
To be capable of respect is, in these days, almost as rare as to be worthy of it.
[Être capable de respect est aujourd’hui presque aussi rare qu’en être digne.]
Joseph Joubert (1754-1824) French moralist, philosopher, essayist, poet
Pensées [Thoughts], ch. 18 “Du Siècle [On the Age],” ¶ 38 (1850 ed.) [tr. Calvert (1866), ch. 13]
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(Source (French)). Alternate translations:
To be capable of respect is well-night as rare at the present day as to be worthy of it.
[tr. Attwell (1896), ¶ 247]
To be capable of respect is almost as rare in these days as to be worthy of it.
[tr. Lyttelton (1899), ch. 17, ¶ 15]
Will we continue to march to the drumbeat of conformity and respectability, or will we, listening to the beat of a more distant drum, move to its echoing sounds? Will we march only to the music of time, or will we, risking criticism and abuse, march to the soul-saving music of eternity?
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968) American clergyman, civil rights leader, social activist, preacher
Strength to Love, ch. 2 “Transformed Nonconformist,” sec. 3 (1963)
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