We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.

The disease which inflicts bureaucracy and what they usually die from is routine.

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.

It is only in the backward countries of the world that increased production is still an important object.

The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.

The philosophy of reasoning, to be complete, ought to comprise the theory of bad as well as of good reasoning.

Whatever helps to shape the human being - to make the individual what he is, or hinder him from being what he is not - is part of his education.