Customs are made for customary circumstances, and customary characters.

He who cannot by his labor suffice for his own support has no claim to the privilege of helping himself to the money of others. By becoming dependent on the remaining members of the community for actual subsistence, he abdicates his claim to equal rights for them I other respects.

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

It often happens that the universal belief of one age of mankind — a belief from which no one was, nor without an extraordinary effort of genius and courage, could at that time be free — becomes to a subsequent age so palpable an absurdity, that the only difficulty then is to imagine how such a thing can ever have appeared credible.

The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.

Stupidity is much the same all the world over