"Unwritten law" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and is an unwritten law that policemen should be Irish. I enjoy Greeks in classic literature or in restaurants, but not as policemen. There is a saying in the city that when Greek meets Greek they go together to get a job on the Market Street Railways. But when they get upon the police force, I for one, shall move to ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... nieces. Carnations leaned from tall glass vases, intricate little cakes jostled carefully piled sandwiches, and a huge brass samovar, borrowed for the occasion, gave dignity to the small parlor. Miss Trueman had learned by now the unwritten law that prevented the various objects in the once proudly segregated "drawing-room set" from association with each other, and made no attempt to correct their intentional isolation. The samovar she refused utterly to meddle with, assuring them that she would ...
— Julia The Apostate • Josephine Daskam
... gradually risen a system of fagging, such as is or was practised in the great English public schools—enforced services exacted from the younger lads—which at the time Myles came to Devlen had, in the five or six years it had been in practice, grown to be an absolute though unwritten law of the body—a law supported by all the prestige of long-continued usage. At that time the bachelors numbered but thirteen, yet they exercised over the rest of the sixty-four squires and pages a rule of iron, and were taskmasters, hard, ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... inhabitants grew to be proud of their rosy citadel; it was an unwritten law among them that every new house should adapt itself to this tone. For the rest, there was not much building done after his death, with the exception of a few isolated villas that sprang up, despite his old commands, in the neighbourhood. ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... fatuous "unwritten law" which allows a man to murder another man and the wife who has offended what he calls "his honor." There is nothing about that honor of his in old or new testament. It is a notion of his own, which overrides, "Thou shalt not kill," as easily as "lying like a gentleman" ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... results from pleasant chance encounters—and the experienced, subtle man of the world was able to perceive that, and to act upon it. That he has pursued his wonted way of life, and that she has married lovelessly (for a husband who plays whist is, by the unwritten law of romance, a husband who can by no possibility be loved!), proves merely that each has fallen away in the pursuit of any ideal which may then have urged itself—not that both would certainly have "saved their souls" if they had married one another. Speaking elsewhere in this book of Browning's ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... that such a veto in black and white was necessary. When they drew up the rules of membership the other sex never fell like a black shadow on the paper; it was forgotten. We owe our eligibility to many other offices (generally disputed at law) to the same accident. In short, the unwritten law of the argumentum ad crinolinam puts us ...
— Better Dead • J. M. Barrie
... the Judge's face. Startled, confounded by the unexpected suddenness of the attack, Rablay backed two or three paces, and, blinded by the rush of blood from his forehead, drew out his handkerchief. No one stirred. It was part of the unwritten law in Garotte to let every man in such circumstances play his game as he pleased. For a moment or two the Judge mopped his face, and then he started towards his assailant with his round face puckered up and out-thrust ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... Nation Developed.—The nation in embryo can be found in the primitive horde which was made up of families related by ties of kin, or by common language and customs. The control was held by the elderly men of experience, and exercised according to unwritten law. The horde was only loosely organized; it did not own land, but ranged over the hunting-grounds within its reach, and often small units separated permanently from the larger group. When hunting gave place to the domestication ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... of poesy which has glorified these works and those of their kind, the spring of the unwritten law yielding preeminence to the emotional arts. Impulse is the life of it: it dies when short ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... man ahead would turn in his saddle and blaze away at his pursuer, and Bud wondered that none of these hastily fired bullets came near their mark. For his part he saved his fire. It was not his idea to shoot the rustlers, but rather to capture them alive, since the unwritten law of that lawless land decreed that shooting was too merciful a death for ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... community it was natural that the early days of self-government should witness some corruption among the voters, the more so because, at election times "there were no less than four days, the nomination, two days' polling, and declaration day, on all of which, by a sort of unwritten law, the candidates in many constituencies were compelled to keep open house for their supporters," while direct money bribes were often resorted to, especially on the second day's ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... consider the question, What is Law? and to emphasise the essential difference between customary, conventional or written Law and that unwritten Law, proceeding from the Inward Light of Reason, that inspires men, in action as in words, to do as they would be done unto. He first gives the following clear, rational and sufficient definition ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... all. The unwritten law, my friend. I find you insulting my cousin and the hot blood in me boils. I avenge her. Regrettable, of course. Too hasty, perhaps. But—oh well, let bygones ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... she had invited them. Why should all questions be left to the politicians and the journalists? Why should not the people interested take a hand; meet and talk over these little matters with quiet voices and attentive ears, amid surroundings where the unwritten law would restrain ladies and gentlemen from addressing other ladies and gentlemen as blood-suckers or anarchists, as grinders of the faces of the poor or as oily-tongued rogues; arguments not really conducive to mutual understanding and the bridging over of differences. The latest Russian dancer, ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... when the Mother-Bird began to disappear from the drawing-room and to appear in the smoking-room, or say whether she passed from the one to the other in a voluntary exile or by the rigor of the women's unwritten law. Still, from time to time she was seen in their part of the ship, after she was also seen where the band of violets showed strange and sad through veils of smoke that were not dense enough to hide her poor, pretty little face, with ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... singly and discreetly with the soldiers, and then upon return to barracks exchange news we had gleaned. I may say it became an unwritten law of the camp that, if a civilian took a soldier into the canteen and asked him any questions, he was to reciprocate by treating the Tommy to some little dainty which was obtainable. If we asked nothing the soldier got nothing. ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... from his. "If," she continues, with that terrible calmness,—"if you wanted to marry Miss Constance Devereux; if I wished to marry—let us say, Lord Harford—there is nothing to prevent it except," slowly, "the unwritten law of a ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... his summer residence a pretty cottage on the banks of the Hudson. The region abounded in natural beauty and stately homes. There was an infusion of Knickerbocker blood in the pre-eminently elect ones of society, and from these there was a gradual shading off in several directions, until by some unwritten law the social line was drawn. Strangers from the city might be received within the inner circle, or they might not, as some of the leaders practically decreed by their own action. Mr. Vosburgh did not care in the least ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... and to the popular mind seem unexplainable. There undoubtedly must be a reason, and what it is, is not hard to find. It seems one of the mysteries of judging and of justice, as though there were an unwritten law in the back of the human mind in favor of property rights. There is an explanation and not an inequality of justice. The facts are not as they are popularly stated or supposed to be. The public gets only a portion of the picture, ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... with its purest virtues constituted the strong point amongst the Arabian tribes, where gentleness, free obedience, and forbearance were conspicuous. Each tribe bore the name of its first ancestor, and from him and his successors came down a traditionary, unwritten law, the violation of which was considered the most heinous of offences. There was no settled religion before the conquest of Mohammed; each tribe and each family worshipped whom they would—celestial spirits, sun and moon, or certain idols. ...
— Oriental Literature - The Literature of Arabia • Anonymous
... seemed to rise up and rush to the surface. How inhuman, how against nature it was, that two human beings who wished to know each other should be held back from such knowledge by mere convention, by the unwritten law of the solemn and formal introduction! A great happiness might lie in their intercourse, but conventionality solemnly and selfishly forbade it, unless they could find a common acquaintance to mumble a few unmeaning words over them. Mumbo-Jumbo! ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... walls; books and pictures and handsome ornaments crowded each other; every chair had been designed for comfort as well as elegance; the dining table was hidden beneath finest damask, and glittered with silver and crystal. It was an unwritten law that every one should dress for dinner; and with the rich curtains hiding the gloomy mountain and the long sweep of cliffs intersected by gorge and gulch, it was easy for the gay congenial band of exiles to forget that they were not eating the delicacies of their French cook and drinking their costly ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... our Indian legislation. No Government was 'ever less justly chargeable with enacting laws merely for the sake of legislation.' The faults have arisen from defects of style and from the peculiar conditions of Indian administration. The unwritten law of India is mainly personal; and many difficulties have arisen from the mixture of English law with the Mohammedan and Hindoo laws and other native customs. All cases not otherwise provided for were to be decided by justice, ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... rowdyism and never except with the school. As a rule, they amused themselves by shouting rude chaff. The school regarded them with a lofty contempt, much as an Oxford man regards the townee. The school was always anxious for a row, but it was the unwritten law that only in special circumstances should they proceed to active measures. A curious dislike for school-and-town rows and most misplaced severity in dealing with the offenders when they took place, were among the few flaws in the otherwise admirable character ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... anthropomorphic. To eutychein, 'the fact of success', is 'a god and more than a god'; to gignoskein philous, 'the thrill of recognizing a friend' after long absence, is a 'god'; wine is a 'god' whose body is poured out in libation to gods; and in the unwritten law of the human conscience 'a great god liveth and groweth not old'.[12:4] You will say that is mere poetry or philosophy: it represents a particular theory or a particular metaphor. I think not. Language of this sort ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... daughter—his child—the beautiful one. He sat still, and then he grew very calm. It was the calmness of the old Conway spirit returning. "Richard Travis," he said to himself, "knows as well what this act of his means in the South,—in the unwritten law of our land—as I do. He has taken his chance of life or death. I'll see that it is death. This is the last of me and my house. But in the fall I'll see that this Philistine of ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... commanded to dine with H.R.H." The horrible capillary plaster necessary before a man can serve decently as an opener of carriage-doors! The horsehair envelopes without which our legal brains cannot work! The unwritten law by which a man has to nurse his hat and stick throughout a call unless his hostess specially asks him ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... As it was an unwritten law of Brill that all hazers must pay for any damage done to college property while hazing anybody, one of the sophomores started for the lavatory where the hose had been attached to a water faucet. But while the water still ran, Tom, aided by Dick and Sam, directed the stream on the ...
— The Rover Boys at College • Edward Stratemeyer
... Lancaster went into the kitchen herself, and Susan went on with the table-setting. Before she had finished, a boarder or two, against the unwritten law of the house, had come downstairs. Mrs. Cortelyou, a thin little wisp of a widow, was in the rocker in the bay-window, Major Kinney, fifty, gray, dried-up, was on the horsehair sofa, watching the kitchen door over his ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... of longer service in the bank than himself; but it is an unwritten law that the cash-book man is supreme in his own circle—and the gabblers mentioned were standing on one of the radii. They glanced at his red face, his burly figure and small ankles, and ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... to bed and early to rise was an unwritten law. By six o'clock next morning, breakfast had been served, and the tourists were on deck with glasses, each anxious to discover objects of interest. During the night busy Leghorn on the coast, and Pisa, and ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... a visible impression on the men and possibly his advice would have been heeded had not Sanders, the chairman, spoken. These were his words: "With all respect to the Judge's remarks I think his premises are wrong. We have an unwritten law in Kentucky that hoss thieves should be put out of the world as soon as they are caught and proved guilty. It saves time, danger of escape, and expense to the State. This is a clear case for Wiles was caught in the very act, and we are quite sure this is not his first offense. My opinion ...
— The Kentucky Ranger • Edward T. Curnick
... ducks and gulls to be taken up to the 5th of June and those of murres, auks and puffins up to the 15th. Flight birds might also be shot at any time on the outside capes and islands. There is a local unwritten law down there—"No guns inside, after the 1st of June"—and it has been kept for twenty years. Similar relaxations might be allowed in other places, in genuine cases of necessity. But the egging and out-of-season slaughter done by people, resident or not, who are in touch with the outside ...
— Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood
... on the table, I under it, and next morning we hired horses and started for the 'Forks of the Yuba.' A few hours' ride brought us to the gold-hunters. Two or three hundred men were at work upon what had formerly been the bed of the river. By unwritten law, each miner was entitled to a certain portion of the 'bar,' as it was called, in which the gold is found. And, as the precious metal has to be obtained by washing, the allotments were measured by thirty feet on the banks of the river and into the dry bed as far as this extends; thus giving each ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... African tribe has an effective method of dealing with bores, which might be adopted by Western peoples. This simple tribe considers long speeches injurious to the orator and his hearers; so to protect both there is an unwritten law that every public orator must stand on only one leg when he is addressing an audience. As soon as he has to place the other leg on the ground his oration is brought to a close, by main force, ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... reasoning Being, in their theory of the relation of God to man; in a word, they have overlooked the heart in man,—the heart which is the organ of love, as intelligence is the organ of thought. The imaginings of man in respect of God may be puerile and mistaken, but his instincts, which are his unwritten law, must be sometimes right; if not, Nature would have lied in creating him. You do not think Nature a lie," I said smiling,—"you, who said just now that truth was perhaps the only virtue? Now, whatever ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... to move composedly while the maid still watched her, she walked slowly out of the room, but the instant the door had closed behind her she flew downstairs to her husband's study and, not pausing to comply with the unwritten law which forbade entrance there without express permission, broke in upon him as he sat at his desk, busily occupied ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... pressing on the part of host and hostess, the other members of the company advanced upon the piano, either singly or in couples, to bear a hand in the burden of entertainment. Their seeming reluctance had no basis in fact; for it was an unwritten law that every one who could must add his mite; and only those who literally had "not a note of music in them" were exempt. Tilly took a mischievous pleasure in announcing bluntly: "So sorry, my dear, not to be able to do you a tool-de-rool! But when the ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... evidence seldom puzzles the man who has mastered the laws of evidence, but he knows little of the laws of evidence who has not studied the unwritten law of the human heart; and without this last knowledge a man of action will not attain to the practical, nor will a ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... conscience until they sank into abominable sins; future judgment will certainly come on all men without respect of persons; the Jews, too, have no right to criticize the Gentiles—they had the Law of Moses, while the Gentiles only had the unwritten law of conscience, yet they failed. The Jewish quibble that there was no good in being a Jew if God condemned him, is refuted. The witness of the Old Testament to the universality of sin is ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... starts. Often he could not get through the common prayers, and in ordinary conversation his tongue would sometimes be tangled among the words of a sentence before he was half through with it. The reader has already learned that the penalties of utter stupidity were not unknown to the unwritten law of the Wittem studentate, notwithstanding that the young men were devout religious; and hence Brother Hecker must have had many hours of anguish. But we cannot suppose that his native cheerfulness was quite ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... matters is, not that the one refuses, while the other demands, the discussion of life's sanctities in Parliament and law-court, but that the one appeals to custom and the other to conscience as the sanction of the unwritten law itself. Whether it be the gods or man, the law of the hearth or of the heart, that is at issue, both agree that what is private and holy has no place in the ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... dogs and their African masters is deep and fully reciprocated. They are considered very dainty eating by the natives, and are indeed such a luxury that by an unwritten law only the superior sex—the men—are allowed to ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... one of the local papers at this time remarked, "that permits a citizen to avenge his outraged honor. There is an unwritten law that permits a community to defend itself by any means in its power, lawful or unlawful, against any evil which the operation of the written law is inadequate to oppose or must oppose by slow, tedious, and unnecessarily expensive proceeding." So this ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... face glowed at the words. He went up and put out his hand, impelled by the hospitality which is an unwritten law of the old West, and is not to be broken ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... little unsteadily, but his father smothered a sigh and watched him with curious solicitude. The unwritten law that Christopher had learnt so well had been very heavily infringed, and Charles Aston had no liking for the man who had infringed it, though he ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... have less liberty than the slaves. How carefully guarded their position was by unwritten law Mary had reason to know. A girl-wife employed a slave-man to do work for a day. His master unexpectedly sent for him, and he asked the girl for the food which was part of his wage. She at first declined; her husband was absent, and it was against the law of the ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... characteristic modesty diffidently approached it. Taking his seat last Wednesday, he to-day delivered his maiden speech. It was risky in face of the sound axiom, adapted from nursery discipline, that new Members should (for a reasonable period) be seen, not heard. As a breaker of unwritten law Sir GEORGE has extenuation of success. This due to intrinsic merits of speech. Foremost of these was brevity. Furthermore, it was in the best sense a contribution to debate, arising directly out of question sprung upon Committee. No asphyxiating smell ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 26, 1916 • Various
... new clothes, I daresay. All girls do when they marry, don't they? It's a kind of unwritten law—new husband, new gowns. But I'm sure you can't look better than you do in that gray gown, and it looks to me just the right thing for travelling. And for any other little things you may want for the moment, ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... a show to escape. Thousands of gentlemen sportsmen have their own separate unwritten codes of honor, but so far as I know, few of them have been written out and adopted as binding rules of action. I know that among expert wing shots it is an unwritten law that quail and grouse must not be shot on the ground, nor ducks on the water. But, among the three million gunners who annually shoot in the United States how many, think you, are there who in actual practice observe any sentimental principles when in the presence of killable game? I should say ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... royal commission had been issued for the purpose of inquiring how far it might be expedient to reduce the written and unwritten law of the country into one digest, and to report on the best manner of doing it. A report was made on this subject in 1834; and while the commissioners were occupied in carrying, in some degree, their own recommendations in respect of it into effect, they were ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... purple-faced general wait respectfully while Captain Prince Andrew, for his own pleasure, chose to chat with Lieutenant Drubetskoy. More than ever was Boris resolved to serve in future not according to the written code, but under this unwritten law. He felt now that merely by having been recommended to Prince Andrew he had already risen above the general who at the front had the power to annihilate him, a lieutenant of the Guards. Prince Andrew came up to him and took ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... resisting a woman than she has of escaping him. Our code of manners forbids the brutality of repressing a woman, whereas repression with your sex is not only allurement to ours, but is imposed upon you by conventions. With us, on the contrary, some unwritten law of masculine self-conceit ridicules a man's modesty; we leave you the monopoly of that virtue, that you may have the privilege of granting us favors; but reverse the case, and ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... never more than a single copy. It came at eight in the morning and was laid on the dining-room mantelpiece, from which (by an unwritten law of the house) it was the duty as well as the honour of the person who had first finished breakfast to take it up and read the most startling part of the news to ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... characteristic both of the English and American bar, and still prevails, though with diminishing force, has given, and necessarily given, great force to judicial precedents. It is mainly through them that with us unwritten law passes into written law. Precedent is a fruit of reason ripened by time. Time, it has been said, is the daughter of Antiquity and takes place after Reason, which is the daughter of Eternity. Precedent rests on both. A legal code framed ...
— The American Judiciary • Simeon E. Baldwin, LLD
... right of closing his lodge at any hour that he may deem expedient, notwithstanding the whole business of the evening may not have been transacted. This regulation arises from the unwritten law of Masonry. As the Master is responsible to the Grand Lodge for the fidelity of the work done in his lodge, and as the whole of the labor is, therefore, performed under his superintendence, it follows that, to enable ...
— The Principles of Masonic Law - A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages And Landmarks of - Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... deer was hidden under a fallen tree-top and one day, while the doe was gone, he fell upon the helpless fawn, which, according to the unwritten law of the forest, was his ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... from field and meadow in a pulsating treble chorus. Dear little black musician of my childhood! Your note still lingers in my memory and brings before me the faces of those long since departed, who sat around the fireplace and listened to your cheery song. There was an unwritten law among us boys never to kill a cricket, and we kept it as sacredly as was kept the law of ...
— Byways Around San Francisco Bay • William E. Hutchinson
... turned away abruptly. He had broken the unwritten law of Rocky Springs, where it was understood that no man spoke of another man's past, or questioned his present doings, or even admitted knowledge of them. But like all the rest of the male portion of Rocky Springs, he possessed a soft spot in his vicious heart for the two sisters, who, in the ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... McKay believed that regulations were made only to oppress; that the men who drafted such a code were idiots, and that those whose duty it became to enforce it were simply spies and tyrants, resistance to whom was innate virtue. He was forever ignoring or violating some written or unwritten law of the Academy; was frequently being caught in the act, and was invariably ready to attribute the resultant report to ill luck which pursued no one else, or to a deliberate persecution which followed him forever. Every six months he had been on the verge of dismissal, and ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... overflowed. Stalking with little reverence into the king's hall, he sternly demanded redress for the brutal act. He could not appeal to the law. The husband in those days was supreme lord and master of his wife. But there was an unwritten law, that of the sword, and the incensed father demanded that the brutal youths should appear in the lists and prove their honor, if they ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... subject, on the members of the legislative body, and even on the sovereign. The people on both sides of the water were accustomed to an orderly government, in which laws were made and administered with regularity and dignity. The next force was the conception of an unwritten law, of the binding power of custom. This idea, although by no means peculiar to the English race, had been developed into an elaborate "common law,"—a system of legal principles accepted as binding on subject and on prince, even without a positive statute. Out of these two underlying principles ...
— Formation of the Union • Albert Bushnell Hart
... The condition of the jurisprudence which it implies has left traces which may still be detected in legal and popular phraseology. The law, thus known exclusively to a privileged minority, whether a caste, an aristocracy, a priestly tribe, or a sacerdotal college is true unwritten law. Except this, there is no such thing as unwritten law in the world. English case-law is sometimes spoken of as unwritten, and there are some English theorists who assure us that if a code of English ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... (I don't mean this for a joke, but I suppose it is one) should prevent anybody from going to a place discovered by somebody else; and why I write is to ask you if there is not an unwritten law against such conduct, and if so will ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 16, 1914 • Various |
