Precedent Quotes - Page 6

• One of the things I've always loved about New York is there is so much precedent for ornament on industrial buildings.

  Annabelle Selldorf

  New York, Ornaments, Building

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• It is found by experience that admirable laws and right precedents among the good have their origin in the misdeeds of others.

  Tacitus

  Law, Found, Admirable

  Tacitus (2013). “The Annals”, p.368, Courier Corporation

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• We can't say that when x happens we get a mass extinction. To the extent we understand mass extinction, one has been caused by glaciation event, one has been caused by a massive climate change, and one has been caused by an asteroid. These events turn out to have no precedent.

  Elizabeth Kolbert

  Mass Extinction, Climate, Events

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• All those things that are now field to be of the greatest antiquity were at one time new; what we to-day hold up by example will rank hereafter as precedent.

  Tacitus

  Example, Fields, One Time

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• Because the bill in reserving a certain parcel of land in the United States for the use of said Baptist Church comprises a principle and a precedent for the appropriation of funds of the United States for the use and support of religious societies, contrary to the article of the Constitution which declares that "Congress shall make no law respecting a religious establishment."

  James Madison

  Religious, Law, Land

  James Madison (1819). “The Writings of James Madison: 1808-1819”, p.133

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• When I won the belt, it was kind of a precedent... The only Canadian to have ever held it.

  Owen Hart

  Kind, Belts

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• We must follow the old authorities and precedents in criminal matters.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Criminals, Matter, Authority

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• To the extent that the judicial profession becomes the daily routine of deciding cases on the most secure precedents and the narrowest grounds available, the judicial mind atrophies and its perspective shrinks.

  Irving Kaufman

  History, Perspective, Mind

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• Well, to have some teams come at you like Montreal did, it’s definitely flattering, and I think it was good for me to also set a precedent for players like me and how important we can be to teams. That was something I was happy to do as well, you know? Sometimes players like me are maybe overlooked or not looked at as an important piece to the puzzle, but it was something I wanted to prove and wanted to show.

  Brandon Prust

  Team, Player, Thinking

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• I walk up and down the rows. The heads look like rubber halloween masks. They also look like human heads, but my brain has no precedent for human heads on tables or in roasting pans or anywhere other than on top of a human bodies, and so I think it has chosen to interpret the sight in a more comforting manner. - Here we are at the rubber mask factory. Look at the nice men and woman working on the masks.

  Mary Roach

  Nice, Halloween, Men

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• It's only now that I realize that behaviour always has a context and precedents, it's what you do rather than what you are, although we often never recognise that context or understand what these precedents are.

  Irvine Welsh

  Behaviour, Realizing, Recognise

  Irvine Welsh (1997). “Marabou Stork Nightmares”, p.134, W. W. Norton & Company

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• This is how great intellectual breakthroughs usually happen in practice. It is rarely the isolated genius having a eureka moment alone in the lab. Nor is it merely a question of building on precedent, of standing on the shoulders of giants, in Newton's famous phrase. Great breakthroughs are closer to what happens in a flood plain: a dozen separate tributaries converge, and the rising waters lift the genius high enough that he or she can see around the conceptual obstructions of the age.

  Steven Johnson

  Practice, Water, Intellectual

  Steven Johnson (2006). “The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World”, p.146, Penguin

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• But man's capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little have been tried.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Learning, Men, Judging

  Henry David Thoreau (2012). “The Portable Thoreau”, p.158, Penguin

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• The higher American patriotism, on the other hand, combines loyalty to historical tradition and precedent with the imaginative projection of an ideal national Promise.

  Herbert Croly

  Loyalty, Hands, Historical

  Herbert Croly (2005). “The Promise of American Life”, p.2, Cosimo, Inc.

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• The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in a many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Dream, Medicine, Fields

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• If settled means that it cant be re-examined, thats one thing. If settled means that it is a precedent that is entitled to respect then it is a precedent that is protected.

  Samuel Alito

  Mean, Protected, One Thing

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• You shouldn't reward me for endangering your life, you know. Think of the precedent you're setting.

  Rainbow Rowell

  Thinking, Rewards, Settings

  Rainbow Rowell (2016). “The Rainbow Rowell Collection: Eleanor & Park, Fangirl, Landline, and Carry On”, p.583, St. Martin's Griffin

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• Just … isn’t giving up allowed sometimes? Isn’t it okay to say, ‘This really hurts, so I’m going to stop trying’?” “It sets a dangerous precedent.” “For avoiding pain?” “For avoiding life.

  Rainbow Rowell

  Hurt, Pain, Giving Up

  Rainbow Rowell (2013). “Fangirl”, p.175, Pan Macmillan

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• A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of the society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sin and suffering.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Adversity, Suffering, Principles

  Thomas Jefferson, Andrew M. Allison (1983). “The Real Thomas Jefferson”, Natl Center for Constitutional

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• Bestow rewards without respect to customary practice; publish orders without respect to precedent. Thus you may employ the entire army as you would one man.

  Sun Tzu

  War, Army, Men

  Sun Tzu, Shang Yang (1997). “The Art of War”, p.48, Wordsworth Editions

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• The scheme, my dear Marqs. which you propose as a precedent, to encourage the emancipation of the black people of this Country from that state of Bondage in wch. they are held, is a striking evidence of the benevolence of your Heart. I shall be happy to join you in so laudable a work.

  George Washington

  Country, Heart, People

  George Washington, Thomas J. Fleming (1967). “Affectionately Yours, George Washington: A Self-portrait in Letters of Friendship”, New York : Norton

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• What they [Jim deMint and the oil lobby] do care about is the precedent. If they open up ANWR (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge), they'll think they can do anything to the environment - anything at all. Drilling in Yosemite? In the Grand Canyon? What's next?

  Barbara Boxer

  Thinking, Oil, Environmental

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• Occasionally we have to interpret an international treaty - one, perhaps, affecting airlines and liability for injury to passengers or damage to goods. Then, of course, we have to look to the precedents of other member nations in resolving issues.

  Sandra Day O'Connor

  Issues, Looks, Damage

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• Historically courts in this country have been insulated. We do not look beyond our borders for precedents.

  Sandra Day O'Connor

  Country, Borders, Looks

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• Sending Paris Hilton to jail for being the most loathed celeprosy lesion in the history of the species seems like a happening idea at first - forty-five days at Century Regional Detention Center is so the new thirty days at Promises Malibu! But it sets a dangerous precedent to jail celebs just because someone hates them.

  Rob Sheffield

  Hate, Ideas, Paris

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