When a government fails to secure the equal right of citizens to the soil, it compels a contest of faiths over resources, which is neither self-evident nor a just construction of the social compact.

The supreme art of war is to shape the terrain so that competition for water and grass never becomes a battle of gods.

Democracy fails not when it lacks laws, but when the habits of the heart - those daily associations of mutual aid - are severed by the sharper blade of inherited belief.

Simplify the quarrel: men are fighting not for water, but for the invisible boundaries their grandfathers drew in the sand.

A society that lets its sons be taught to hate their neighbor’s prayer before they learn to share a well has failed its most basic moral education.

The jurist must separate the dispute over grazing rights, which belongs to the domain of reason and equity, from the theological quarrel, which is a misuse of revelation.