Social progress takes effect through the replacement of all institutions by new ones; and since every institution involves the recognition of the duty of conforming to it, progress must involve the repudiation of an established duty at every step.

God's trustiest lieutenants often lack official credentials. They may be professed atheists who are also men of honour and high public spirit.

The notion that persons should be safe from extermination as long as they do not commit willful murder, or levy war against the Crown, or kidnap, or throw vitriol, is not only to limit social responsibility unnecessarily, and to privilege the large range of intolerable misconduct that lies outside them, but to divert attention from the essential justification for extermination, which is always incorrigible social incompatibility and nothing else.

Fashions are the only induced epidemics, proving that epidemics can be induced by tradesmen.

Englishmen hate Liberty and Equality too much to understand them. But every Englishman loves a pedigree.

Security, the chief pretense of civilization, cannot exist where the worst of dangers, the danger of poverty, hangs over everyone's head.

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.