Every pleasure raises the tide of life; every pain lowers the tide of life.
Religion has been compelled by science to give up one after another of its dogmas. . . .
Architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry, may truly be called the efflorescence of civilised life.
The presumption that any current opinion is not wholly false, gains in strength according to the number of its adherents.
Every unpunished delinquency has a family of delinquencies.
Never educate a child to be a gentleman or lady alone, but to be a man, a woman.
The Republican form of government is the highest form of government: but because of this it requires the highest type of human nature, a type nowhere at present existing.
Is it stupidity or is it moral cowardice which leads men to continue professing a creed that makes self-sacrifice a cardinal principle, while they urge the sacrificing of others, even to the death, when they trespass against us? Is it blindness, or is it an insance inconsistency, which makes them regard as most admirable the bearing of evil for the benefit of others, while they lavish admiration on those who, out of revenge, inflict great evils in return for small ones suffered? Surely our barbarian code of right needs revision, and our barbarian standard of honour should be somewhat changed.
Progress is not an accident, not a thing within human control, but a beneficent necessity ... due to the working of a universal law. So surely must the things we call evil and immorality disappear; so surely must man become perfect.
The white light of truth, in traversing the many sided transparent soul of the poet, is refracted into iris-hued poetry.
Be bold, be bold, and everywhere be bold.
Absolute morality is the regulation of conduct in such a way that pain shall not be inflicted.
The poverty of the incapable, the distresses that come upon the imprudent, the starvation of the idle, and those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong, which leave so many "in shallows and in miseries," are the decrees of a large, far-seeing benevolence.
Education has for its object the formation of character. To curb restive propensities, to awaken dormant sentiments, to strengthen the perceptions, and cultivate the tastes, to encourage this feeling and repress that, so as finally to develop the child into a man of well proportioned and harmonious nature, this is alike the aim of parent and teacher.
Morality knows nothing of geographical boundaries, or distinctions of race.
If men use their liberty in such a way as to surrender their liberty, are they thereafter any the less slaves? If people by a plebiscite elect a man despot over them, do they remain free because the despotism was of their own making?
The saying that beauty is but skin deep, is but a skin-deep saying.
When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don't care if they are shot themselves.
The pursuit of individual happiness within those limits prescribed by social conditions, is the first requisite to the attainment of the greatest general happiness.
Feudalism, serfdom, slavery — all tyrannical institutions, are merely the most vigorous kinds of rule, springing out of, and necessary to, a bad state of man. The progress from these is in all cases the same — less government.
If a single cell, under appropriate conditions, becomes a man in the space of a few years, there can surely be no difficulty in understanding how, under appropriate conditions, a cell may, in the course of untold millions of years, give origin to the human race.
No one can be perfectly happy till all are happy.
Any one who studies the state of things which preceded the French Revolution will see that that tremendous catastrophe came about from so excessive a regulation of men's actions in all their details, and such an enormous drafting away of the products of their actions to maintain the regulating organization, that life was fast becoming impracticable. And if we ask what then made, and now makes, this error possible, we find it to be the political superstition that governmental power is subject to no restraints.
If every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man, then he is free to drop connection with the state-to relinquish its protection, and to refuse paying toward its support.
Unlike private enterprise which quickly modifies its actions to meet emergencies - unlike the shopkeeper who promptly finds the wherewith to satisfy a sudden demand - unlike the railway company which doubles its trains to carry a special influx of passengers; the law-made instrumentality lumbers on under all varieties of circumstances at its habitual rate. By its very nature it is fitted only for average requirements, and inevitably fails under unusual requirements.
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