In its narrowest acceptation, order means obedience. A government is said to preserve order if it succeeds in getting itself obeyed.
Next to selfishness the principal cause which makes life unsatisfactory is want of mental cultivation.
Photography is a brief complicity between foresight and luck.
The peculiarity of the evidence of mathematical truths is that all the argument is on one side.
A person should be free to do as he likes in his own concerns; but he ought not to be free to do as he likes in acting for another, under the pretext that the affairs of the other are his own affairs.
Every one is degraded, whether aware of it or not, when other people, without consulting him, take upon themselves unlimited power to regulate his destiny.
A person’s taste is as much his own peculiar concern as his opinion or his purse.
In the human mind, one-sidedness has always been the rule, and many-sidedness the exception. Hence, even in revolutions of opinion, one part of the truth usually sets while another rises.
The love of power and the love of liberty are in eternal antagonism.
If I have accomplished anything, I owe it, among other fortunate circumstances, to the fact that through the early training bestowed on me by my father, I started, I may fairly say, with an advantage of a quarter of a century over my contemporaries.
It would not be easy even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete, than to endeavor so to live that Christ would approve our life.
I well knew that to propose something which would be called extreme, was the true way not to impede but to facilitate a more moderate experiment.
It is conceivable that religion may be morally useful without being intellectually sustainable.
Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of the representative government, cannot exist.
A democratic constitution, not supported by democratic institutions in detail, but confined to the central government, not only is not political freedom, but often creates a spirit precisely the reverse, carrying down to the lowest grade in society the desire and ambition of political domination.
Seeming contentment is real discontent, combined with indolence or self-indulgence, which, while taking no legitimate means of raising itself, delights in bringing others down to its own level.
There is a very real evil consequent on ascribing supernatural origin to the received maxilms of morality. That origin consecrates the whole of them and protects them from being discussed or criticized.
Trade is a social act. Whoever undertakes to sell any description of any goods to the public, does what affects the interest of other persons, and of society in general; and thus his conduct, in principal, comes within the jurisdiction of society.
He who lets the world choose his plan of life for him has need of no other faculty than that of ape-like imitation.
In the long-run, the best proof of a good character is good actions.