Sentences with phrase «brooding omnipresence»

Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes emphasized the danger of invoking divine morality when he wrote, in a 1917 opinion, «The law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky.»

Whatever doubts may exist about the sources of this democracy, there can be none about the chief source of the morality that gives it life and substance... [From the Hebrew tradition, via the Puritans, come] the contract and all its corollaries; the higher law as something more than a «brooding omnipresence in the sky»; the concept of the competent and responsible individual; certain key ingredients of economic individualism; the insistence on a citizenry educated to understand its rights and duties; and the middle - class virtues, that high plateau of moral stability on which, so Americans believe, successful democracy must always build [Seedtime of the Republic (Harcourt, Brace, 1953, p. 55)-RSB-.