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.

Every man who says frankly and fully what he thinks is so far doing a public service. We should be grateful to him for attacking most unsparingly our most cherished opinions.

Laws and systems of polity always begin by recognizing the relations they find already existing between individuals.

Political Economy, in truth, has never pretended to give advice to mankind with no lights but its own; though people who knew nothing but political economy (and therefore knew it ill) have taken upon themselves to advise, and could only do so by such lights as they had.

There is a tolerably general agreement about what a university is not. It is not a place of professional education.

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

The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.