Stupidity is much the same all the world over. A stupid person’s notions and feelings may confidently be inferred from those which prevail in the circle by which the person is surrounded. Not so with those whose opinions and feelings are an emanation from their own nature and faculties.
The time appears to me to have come when it is the duty of all to make their dissent from religion known.
I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally Conservative. I believe that to be so obvious and undeniable a fact that I hardly think any hon. Gentleman will question it.
Liberty lies in the rights of that person whose views you find most odious.
The concessions of the privileged to the unprivileged are seldom brought about by any better motive than the power of the unprivileged to extort them.
Men are men before they are lawyers, or physicians, or merchants, or manufacturers; and if you make them capable and sensible men, they will make themselves capable and sensible lawyers or physicians.
Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.
Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.
All political revolutions, not affected by foreign conquest, originate in moral revolutions. The subversion of established institutions is merely one consequence of the previous subversion of established opinions.
The most cogent reason for restricting the interference of government is the great evil of adding unnecessarily to its power.
It can do truth no service to blind the fact, known to all who have the most ordinary acquaintance with literary history, that a large portion of the noblest and most valuable moral teaching has been the work not only of men who did not know, but of men who knew and rejected the Christian faith.
Instead of the function of governing, for which it is radically unfit, the proper office of a representative assembly is to watch and control the government.
Everyone who receives the protection of society owes a return for the benefit.
Lord, enlighten thou our enemies. Sharpen their wits, give acuteness to their perceptions, and consecutiveness and clearness to their reasoning powers: we are in danger from their folly, not from their wisdom; their weakness is what fills us with apprehension, not their strength.
I will call no being good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures; and if such a creature can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go .
Money is a machine for doing quickly and commodiously what would be done, though less quickly and commodiously, without it.
It is useful while mankind is imperfect that there should be different opinions, so that there should be different experiments of living, that free scope should be given to varieties of character, short of injury to others.
It would be a great misunderstanding of this doctrine to suppose that it is one of selfish indifference about the well-being of others’.
It is a law, that every event depends on the same law.
Almost all rich veins of original and striking speculation have been opened by systematic half-thinkers.