It is dangerous, at any time, to multiply sources of weakness.
Political differences essentially depend on disagreement in moral principles.
Many things are better for silence than for speech: others are better for speech than for stationery.
Piety sometimes gives birth to scruples, and faith to superstition, when they are not directed by wisdom and knowledge.
Monarchy hardens into despotism. Aristocracy contracts into oligarchy. Democracy expands into the supremacy of numbers.
It is very easy to speak words of wisdom from a comfortable distance, when one sees no reality, no details, none of the effect on men’s minds.
The strong man with the dagger is followed by the weak man with the sponge.
The test of liberty is the position and security of minorities.
Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority.
Fanaticism in religion is the alliance of the passions she condemns with the dogmas she professes.
Everybody likes to get as much power as circumstances allow, and nobody will vote for a self-denying ordinance.
A people averse to the institution of private property is without the first elements of freedom.
Ink was not invented to express our real feelings.
Government rules the present. Literature rules the future.
The law of liberty tends to abolish the reign of race over race, of faith over faith, of class over class. It is not the realization of a political ideal; it is the discharge of a moral obligation.
We are not sure we are right until we have made the best case possible for those who are wrong.
Towns were the nursery of freedom.
Many men can no more be kept straight by spiritual motives than we can live without policemen.
Fanaticism displays itself in the masses; but the masses were rarely fanaticised; and the crimes ascribed to it were commonly due to the calculations of dispassionate politicians.
History, to be above evasion or dispute, must stand on documents, not on opinions.