The most important thing women have to do is to stir up the zeal of women themselves.

In this age, the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service.

The despotism of custom is on the wane. We are not content to know that things are; we ask whether they ought to be.

The best state for human nature is that in which, while no one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear from thrust back, by the efforts of others to push themselves forward.

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

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.

If two or more instances of the phenomenon under investigation have only one circumstance in common, the circumstance in which alone all the instances agree is the cause (or effect) of the given phenomenon.