"Unwritten law" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... quite so hard when pelting the girls, nor wash their faces with the same vehemence as they did each other's, but there was no public evidence of partiality. However, if any boy was too rough or took advantage of a girl smaller than himself, he was promptly thrashed by his fellows. There was an unwritten law and public sentiment in that little Academy world that enabled us to study and play together with the greatest freedom ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... to one side. It is an unwritten law amongst poker players, in a public place in the west of the American continent, that no onlooker should stand immediately behind any player. He moved to Lablache's right. The money-lender was dealing. "Lord" Bill lit ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... walk along Montgomery street to Market, where he turned westward. It was Saturday and his father's office, where he was now studying law, had been closed since noon. It had become a custom—almost an unwritten law—to promenade San Francisco's lordly thoroughfare on the last afternoon of the week, especially the northern side. For Market street was now a social barrier. South of it were smaller, meaner shops, saloons, beer-swilling "cafe ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... resent a real or fancied affront to its dignity. A warped sense of honor, a sort of belated theory of chivalry, is responsible for some acts of violence. A seducer is likely to be called to account and the slayer, by invoking the "unwritten law," has usually been acquitted. Such a case lends itself to the display of flamboyant oratory, and the plea of "protecting the home" has set many murderers free. Perhaps the South is becoming less susceptible ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson
... 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, ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... experimentation. Or they dislike, even abhor, it as esthetically repulsive—shocking to an unreasoned but cherished craving for silence about these things—a craving which the customs of our land and time have made an unwritten law of society. ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... herds, going hundreds of miles into Mexico on their forays rather than break their treaty with the Americans. They could have easily carried off our stock by killing the few vaqueros kept with them on the range, but refrained from doing so from motives well understood on the frontiers. There is an unwritten law among ranchmen as old as the ...
— Building a State in Apache Land • Charles D. Poston
... allowing its contributors extraordinary liberty in some matters, it sustained what may perhaps be described as a literary policy. Like other venerable institutions, the Athenaeum had a taste for unwritten law; its policy was adumbrated rather than defined, but few contributors, I believe, were unconscious of its existence. Not one of us, I am sure, would have expressed anything but what he thought and felt, but we all ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... self-abnegation is the first of her duties; however much she may suffer, she must present as calm and serene a countenance as a warrior in the hour of danger, and fall, if necessary, upon the spot, with death in her heart and a smile upon her lips. In order to obey this unwritten law, Madame de Bergenheim, after a slight interruption, seated herself at the piano to accompany three or four young girls who were each to sing in turn the songs that they had been ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... months, and Uncle Jim said nothing of pay, and the meals were regular and good. The intention of every man in that little valley to do "about what was right" was silently and fully evidenced. That a man would give up his gun was proof enough of that. So this became the custom of the place, the unwritten law. When by any chance a man got hold of enough of the three hundred dollars to settle his bill with Uncle Jim, he walked in, handed over the cash, and without comment of his own or of any one else, took down his gun from behind the door, and then walked off down the street with his head and his ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... codification, which, until recent years, was a 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 ...
— The American Judiciary • Simeon E. Baldwin, LLD
... 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 of animals, ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... newcomers' suppers, attributed the savage way in which their master whipped off his host's team from trying to get a second helping, to the weariness of a long journey. For to beat another man's dogs, especially with the long and heavy lash of our Northern whips, is a breach of the unwritten law of the Labrador. ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... and rise above the state of children, so far they become emancipated from this written law, and invested with the perfect freedom which consists in the fulness and joyfulness of compliance with a higher and unwritten law; a law so universal, so subtle, so glorious, that nothing but the ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... conscience, which is the only kind of conscience men now have. What does having an individual conscience mean? It means submitting voluntarily to an external law, attested and found good by my own conscience. It means unconditionally heeding the unwritten law, which I lay upon myself, and following this inner law even when I must stand ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... law," 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 municipal homeopathy of curing lawlessness ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... there was no help for it; he could not avoid her without making the avoidance plain to all observers, and Ford was proud. As to Dick, he would not send him off without some proof that he had broken an unwritten law of the Double Cross and brought whisky to the ranch; and of that he had no proof. As to his suspicions—well, he considered that Dick had almost paid the penalty for having roused them, and the matter would have to rest where it was; for Ford was just. As to the jug, he could ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... He had just lost a prisoner, which was against the unwritten law of the Force, but he had gained another in his place. It would not be long till he ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... hope he can prove he was in Nashville. We have tried to prove it, and we cannot. And you must admit, Mrs. Lawrence, that had he known what you planned he would have had the justification of the unwritten law—" ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... 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, equity, and good conscience. Much latitude of decision ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... piaster an hour. We frequently shared with them our frugal, and even scanty meals; and in turn they assisted us in our purchases and arrangements for lodgings, for their word, we found, was with the common people an almost unwritten law. Then, too, they were of great assistance in crossing streams where the depth would have necessitated the stripping of garments; although their fiery little steeds sometimes objected to having an extra rider ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... of some kind of equitable arrangement was so strongly felt by American publishers that a kind of unwritten law gradually established itself among them. It was tacitly understood, that, when a publisher had paid an English author for advance sheets, no rival American edition should be published. But it already appears too plainly that an arrangement ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... 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
... in all public land as claims. J. G. Whitmore had contented himself with acquiring title to the whole of the Flying U coulee, secure in his belief that the old order of things would not change, in his life-time, at least, and that the unwritten law of the range land, which leaves the vicinity of a ranch to the use of the ranch owner, would never be repealed by new customs imposed by ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower
... the king's army, and there is an unwritten law that all non-commissioned officers are my inferiors, here or elsewhere, and must obey me. You shall go to the guardhouse. I asked nothing of you but a common courtesy, and you became insolent. To the ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... as he never did before and all his bodily strength went into his prayer. At a quarter past one, when he was still calling on the God of Life for help, the Sheriff knew not what to do, for by the unwritten law the man of God had a right to finish his prayer. At half past one, the Sheriff moved uneasily and at length uttered a faint "Amen," as though to give the signal to stop. As it had no effect he realized for the first time just what Hartigan's desperation and iron will were leading him ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton |
