Michel de Montaigne Quotes

I shall continue to be an impossible person so long as those who are now possible remain possible.

Sometimes, when a tide starts to sweep, it makes no difference what the traditions are.

Laws and customs may be creative of vice; and should be therefore perpetually under process of observation and correction.

Society will pardon much to genius and special gifts; but, being in its nature conventional, it loves what is conventional, or what belongs to coming together.

Culture is a product of law. And laws create norms for society. This is why anyone who wants to change the culture of a country must try to change the norms of the country.

Breaking accepted rules does bring people together.

Bandwagons roll through our lives. It's up to you whether you jump on them unquestioningly or jump on them to overturn them and subvert them.

Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.

Differences are scarier now. The dollar isn't so guaranteed if you don't follow what they see as the norm. But I don't moan about it. I just keep working.

Society honors its living conformists and its dead troublemakers.

I have observed that society in general always seems to honor its living conformists and its dead troublemakers.

You do what you think is right and let the law catch up.

The courts may be the most important instrument for social, economic, and political change.

Courts should ... follow, rather than lead, changes taking place elsewhere in society.

We … need education in the obvious – to learn to transcend our own convictions and to leave room for much that we hold dear to be done away with short of revolution by the orderly change of law.

It is as it should be that the law is behind the times.

Laws never would be improved, if there were not numerous persons whose moral sentiments are better than the existing laws.

We must liberate our concepts of justice, our laws and legal institutions from the bonds which hold a tight grip on us although they are incompatible with the needs of our century.

Never can a new idea move within the law. It matters not whether that idea pertains to political and social changes or to any other domain of human thought and expression … How can it be otherwise? The law is stationary, fixed, mechanical, "a chariot wheel" which grinds all alike without regard to time, place and condition, without ever taking into account cause and effect, without ever going into the complexity of the human soul.

Action requires co-operation, but in general if you set your face against custom, people will set their faces against you. They cannot tell whether you are right or wrong, but they know that you are guilty of a pragmatical assumption of superiority over them which they do not like.

Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also and keep pace with the times

… all change in history, all advance, comes from the nonconformists. If there had been no trouble-makers, no Dissenters, we should still be living in caves.

Law and justice are not always the same. When they aren't, destroying the law may be the first step toward changing it.

Things that used to be illicit are not illicit today. Licit products of yesterday, may be illicit today.

No iconoclast can possibly escape the severest criticism. …. The world always demands of a prophet a double standard. He must live a life consistent with his dreams, and at the same time must obey the conventions of the world. He cannot be judged either by one or the other, but must be judged by both.