Hardly any original thoughts on mental or social subjects ever make their way among mankind or assume their proper importance in the minds even of their inventors, until aptly selected words or phrases have as it were nailed them down and held them fast.

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.

The individual is not accountable to society for his actions in so far as these concern the interests of no person but himself.

No longer enslaved or made dependent by force of law, the great majority are so by force of property; they are still chained to a place, to an occupation, and to conformity with the will of an employer, and debarred by the accident of birth to both the enjoyments, and from the mental and moral advantages, which others inherit without exertion and independently of desert. That this is an evil equal to almost any of those against which mankind have hitherto struggles, the poor are not wrong in believing.

Almost all rich veins of original and striking speculation have been opened by systematic half-thinkers.

The ne plus ultra of wickedness ... is embodied in what is commonly presented to mankind as the creed of Christianity.

My father taught me that the question Who made me? cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question, Who made God?