No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought.

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.

God is a word to express, not our ideas, but the want of them.

The spirit of improvement is not always a spirit of liberty, for it may aim at forcing improvements on an unwilling people.

All women are brought up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that of men; not self-will, and government by self-control, but submission and yielding to the control of others. All the moralities tell them that it is their nature to live for others; to make complete abnegation of themselves, and to have no life but in their affections.

Marriage is the only actual bondage known to our law. There remain no legal slaves, except the mistress of every house.

There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.