He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.

Human beings are no longer born to their place in life...but are free to employ their faculties and such favorable chances as offer, to achieve the lot which may appear to them as desirable.

A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.

We have hitherto considered only two possibilities: that the received opinion may be false, and some other opinion, consequently, true; or that, the received opinion being true, a conflict with the opposite error is essential to a clear apprehension and deep feeling of its truth. But there is a commoner case than either of these; when the conflicting doctrines, instead of being one true and the other false, share the truth between them.

A government with all this mass of favours to give or to withhold, however free in name, wields a power of bribery scarcely surpassed by an avowed autocracy, rendering it master of the elections in almost any circumstances but those of rare and extraordinary public excitement.

Judgement is given to men that they may use it. Because it may be used erroneously, are men to be told that they ought not to use it at all?

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.