The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it

There is nothing which an untrained mind shows itself more hopelessly incapable, than in drawing the proper general conclusions from its own experience. And even trained minds, when all their training is on a special subject, and does not extend to the general principles of induction, are only kept right when there are ready opportunities of verifying their inferences by facts.

No slave is a slave to the same lengths, and in so full a sense of the word, as a wife is.

Persons of genius, it is true, are, and are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow.

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.

A person whose desires and impulses are his own - are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture - is said to have a character. One whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character, no more than a steam-engine has character.

The concessions of the privileged to the unprivileged are seldom brought about by any better motive than the power of the unprivileged to extort them.