It is a maxim among these lawyers, that whatever hath been done before, may legally be done again: and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of mankind.
Jonathan Swift

As to the deceit perpetrated upon women, let it pass, for, when love is in the way, men and women as a general rule dupe each other.
Giacomo Casanova

General consultant to mankind.
George Bernard Shaw

For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment.
Viktor E. Frankl

If we had in this room a hundred teachers, good teachers from good schools, and asked them to define the word education, there would be very little general agreement.
William Glasser

Nature, who for the perfect maintenance of the laws of her general equilibrium, has sometimes need of vices and sometimes of virtues, inspires now this impulse, now that one, in accordance with what she requires.
Marquis de Sade

Therefore, in the course of the work I have followed this plan: I describe in the first book all the positions of the orbits together with the movements which I ascribe to the Earth, in order that this book might contain, as it were, the general scheme of the universe.
Nicolaus Copernicus

A man, as a general rule, owes very little to what he is born with - a man is what he makes of himself.
Alexander Graham Bell

It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear.
Douglas MacArthur

In effect, to follow, not to force the public inclination; to give a direction, a form, a technical dress, and a specific sanction, to the general sense of the community, is the true end of legislature.
Edmund Burke

It is a general popular error to suppose the loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare.
Edmund Burke

I hate facts. I always say the chief end of man is to form general propositions - adding that no general proposition is worth a damn.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

As for charity, it is a matter in which the immediate effect on the persons directly concerned, and the ultimate consequence to the general good, are apt to be at complete war with one another.
John Stuart Mill

The general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind.
John Stuart Mill

He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.
Herman Melville

Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires.
Bertrand Russell

Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.
Honore De Balzac

As to the war with Japan, the President had already received my memorandum in general as to the possibility of getting a substantial unconditional surrender from Japan which I had written before leaving Washington and which he had approved.
Henry L. Stimson

In most communities it is illegal to cry "fire" in a crowded assembly. Should it not be considered serious international misconduct to manufacture a general war scare in an effort to achieve local political aims?
Dwight D. Eisenhower

Our tragedy is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it... the basest of all things is to be afraid.
William Faulkner