We never could clearly understand how it is that egotism, so unpopular in conversation, should be so popular in writing.

The Church is the handmaid of tyranny and the steady enemy of liberty.

Genius is subject to the same laws which regulate the production of cotton and molasses.

Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from birth as a paternal, or, in other words, a meddling government, a government which tells them what to read, and say, and eat, and drink and wear.

A government cannot be wrong in punishing fraud or force, but it is almost certain to be wrong if, abandoning its legitimate function, it tells private individuals that it knows their business better than they know it themselves.

Those who seem to load the public taste are, in general, merely outrunning it in the direction which it is spontaneously pursuing.

This is the highest miracle of genius, that things which are not should be as though they were, that the imaginations of one mind should become the personal recollections of another.