How to root your new ideas deeply in the verdant soil of antiquity

Have you ever looked for a set of words that magically
communicate the reason why your cause is just? Effective
places to look for such words are the statements of figures in
history and philosophy whose works have been hallowed by time.
By discovering where their statements are congruent with
yours, you borrow their credibility. By rooting your new ideas
in this verdant soil of antiquity, you give them strength,
power, and stability that they cannot get any other way.
This process bolsters your credibility, puts judges and juries
at ease because they are familiar with the sources, and makes
you more effective by increasing your own confidence in your
work product. Because it is prudent and ethical to respect
authors' intellectual property rights, the safest way to
implement this concept is to use materials in the public
domain. Public domain texts are those for which there is no
copyright pending because the copyright has lapsed.
There are several useful hard copy (published on paper) and
online resources that I will point out here, but before I do,
we must acknowledge a possible copyright infringement,
liability-producing problem in the use of these materials.
Just because something is online does not mean that you can
freely download it and share it. (That applies to this column,
too.) The choice of an author to quote a classic public domain
text is part of the author's intellectual labor and is the
subject matter of copyright once that work is in a tangible
(readable) format.

Have faith that the public domain is large enough that you can
find a phrase that encapsulates your thoughts without invading
someone else's thought-capsule. It is essential that you keep
excellent, honest, and complete records of your search that
allow you to distinguish between your ideas and the thoughts
of others. These records help you by creating tangible
evidence of your search that bolsters your self-confidence in
the search result, and will be of help later if there is a
question or litigation.

My favorite way of getting into this material is to use the
Great Books of the Western World set, published by
Encyclopedia Britannica. You start in volumes two and
three-the "Syntopicon." The Syntopicon is an index to the
ideas expressed in the rest of the volumes. The rest of the
volumes include the full text of classic works of Aristotle,
Plato, Shakespeare, John Stuart Mill, and many of the
documents that contribute legal ideas like the Federalist
Papers and the US Constitution. The real values of the
Syntopicon are that

1) it is a human-created index by ideas and concepts-like
TRUTH or JUSTICE- -rather than a machine-created key-word
index;

2) the coverage is from antiquity to the present, so that you
can follow an idea through its developmental stages; and

3) the references are to the quarter of a page where your
relevant issue is discussed so that you do not waste time.

The best repository of public-domain classic texts online is
Project Gutenberg, at promo.net/pg/ or gutenberg.net. You may
search the Project Gutenberg files by author or title. You can
also get a compressed list of authors, titles, or books on the
web site.
For reference texts-including poetry, verse, and quotations,
check Bartleby at bartelby.com/.. There, you will find four
major categories of materials-reference, verse, fiction, and
nonfiction.
The Classic Bookshelf, at classicbookshelf.com, indexes its
material by author.
You will find some overlap when you compare the materials on
these sites. That overlap helps you because if one site is not
available, you have alternatives.