A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.
No slave is a slave to the same lengths, and in so full a sense of the word, as a wife is.
The reasons for legal intervention in favour of children apply not less strongly to the case of those unfortunate slaves and victims of the most brutal part of mankind – the lower animals.
There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ way to build an audience.
But these few are the salt of the earth; without them, human life would become a stagnant pool. Not only is it they who introduce good things which did not before exist, it is they who keep the life in those which already existed.
There is an imaginary circle drawn around every human being, over which no government should be able to step.
To mistake money for wealth, is the same sort of error as to mistake the highway which may be the easiest way of getting to your house or lands, for the house and lands themselves.
Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.
Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.
Life has a certain flavor for those who have fought and risked all that the sheltered and protected can never experience.
On religion in particular, the time appears to me to have come, when it is a duty of all who, being qualified in point of knowledge, have, on mature consideration, satisfied themselves that the current opinions are not only false, but hurtful, to make their dissent known.
I am not aware that any community has a right to force another to be civilized.
The dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of the pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes.
The object of universities is not to make skillful lawyers, physicians or engineers. It is to make capable and cultivated human beings.
It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being.
Popular opinions, on subjects not palpable to sense, are often true, but seldom or never the whole truth.
It is a bitter thought, how different a thing the Christianity of the world might have been, if the Christian faith had been adopted as the religion of the empire under the auspices of Marcus Aurelius instead of those of Constantine.
No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought.
The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.
The disease which inflicts bureaucracy and what they usually die from is routine.