The love of power and the love of liberty are in eternal antagonism.

If it were only that people have diversities of taste, that is reason enough for not attempting to shape them all after one model. But different persons also require different conditions for their spiritual development, and can no more exist healthily in the same moral, than all the varieties of plants can in the same physical, atmosphere and climate.

Any participation, even in the smallest public function, is useful.

What little recognition the idea of obligation to the public obtains in modern morality, is derived from Greek and Roman sources, not from Christian; as, even in the morality of private life, whatever exists of magnanimity, high-mindeness, personal dignity, even the sense of honour, is derived from the purely human, not the religious part of our education, and never could have grown out of a standard of ethics in which the only worth, professedly recognized, is that of obedience.

The peculiarity of the evidence of mathematical truths is that all the argument is on one side.

Over one's mind and over one's body the individual is sovereign.

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