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.

So natural to mankind is intolerance ... that religious freedom has hardly anywhere been practically realized.

If it were felt that the free development of individuality is one of the leading essentials of well-being; that it is not only a coordinate element with all that is designated by the terms civilisation, instruction, education, culture, but is itself a necessary part and condition of all those things; there would be no danger that liberty should be undervalued.

Men do not desire to be rich, but to be richer than other men.

The pupil who is never required to do what he cannot do, never does what he can do.

The great majority of those who speak of perfectibility as a dream, do so because they feel that it is one which would afford them no pleasure if it were realized.