Quote#Politics & Power
The law and the constitution are like a child's pants. They've got to…
Quote byJohn Buchan · 1875–1940
Commonly attributed — not confirmed in an authoritative edition. Cited on Wikiquote to: The Path of the King (1921), Ch. XIV "The End of the Road", I.
English (original)
The law and the constitution are like a child's pants. They've got to be made wider and longer as the child grows so as to fit him. If they're kept too tight, he'll burst them; and if you're in a hurry and make them too big all at once, they'll trip him up.
— John Buchan
More from John Buchan
The Simple Life is the last refuge of complicated and restless souls.
The secret of life is to find out what one really wants.
The robe of flesh wears thin, and with the years God shines through all things.
The task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there.
Happiness lies only in a divine unrest; and if you are lapped in comfort you stagnate and miss it.
In our modern world we have seen inaugurated the reign of a dull bourgeois rationalism, which finds some inadequate reason for all things in heaven and earth and makes a god of its own infallibility.