Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.
A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury.
I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than in attempting to satisfy them.
I will call no being good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures; and if such a creature can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go .
It is not because men's desires are strong that they act ill; it is because their consciences are weak.
Every man who says frankly and fully what he thinks is so far doing a public service. We should be grateful to him for attacking most unsparingly our most cherished opinions.
A state which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes--will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished.
Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think…
A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.
The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.
So long as an opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses in stability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it.
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.
No one can be a great thinker who does not recognize that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead.
Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post as soon as there is no enemy in the field.
The time appears to me to have come when it is the duty of all to make their dissent from religion known.
If any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility.
Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement.
The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited, he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.
So true is that unnatural generally means only uncustomary, and that everything which is usual appears natural.
There are no means of finding what either one person or many can do, but by trying - and no means by which anyone else can discover for them what it is for their happiness to do or leave undone
It is given to no human being to stereotype a set of truths, and walk safely by their guidance with his mind's eye closed.
No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought.
After the primary necessities of food and raiment, freedom is the first and strongest want of human nature.
The strongest of all arguments against the interference of the public with purely personal conduct, is that when it does interfere, the odds are that it interferes wrongly, and in the wrong place.
The love of power and the love of liberty are in eternal antagonism.
There have been, and may be again, great individual thinkers, in a general atmosphere of mental slavery.
As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.
In history, as in traveling, men usually see only what they already had in their own minds; and few learn much from history, who do not bring much with them to its study.
One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100,000 who have only interests.
Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seem good to themselves than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.
