All that makes existence valuable to any one depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people.

If religious belief be indeed so necessary to mankind, as we are continually assured that it is, there is great reason to lament, that the intellectual grounds of it should require to be backed by moral bribery or subornation of the understanding.

A being who can create a race of men devoid of real freedom and inevitably foredoomed to be sinners, and then punish them for being what he has made them, may be omnipotent and various other things, but he is not what the English language has always intended by the adjective holy.

A [psychological] difficulty is not an impossibility.

When the land is cultivated entirely by the spade and no horses are kept, a cow is kept for every three acres of land.

Popular opinions, on subjects not palpable to sense, are often true, but seldom or never the whole truth.

There are no means of finding what either one person or many can do, but by trying - and no means by which anyone else can discover for them what it is for their happiness to do or leave undone