Great Throughts Treasury

"To tax the larger incomes at a higher percentage than the smaller, is to lay a tax on industry and economy; to impose a penalty on people for having worked harder and saved more than their neighbors. It is not the fortunes which are earned, but those which are unearned, that it is for the public good to place under limitation."

"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."

"When the “sacredness of property” is talked of, it should always be remembered, that any such sacredness does not belong in the same degree to landed property. No man made the land. It is the original inheritance of the whole species. Its appropriation is wholly a question of general expediency. When private property in land is not expedient, it is unjust. It is no hardship to any one, to be excluded from what others have produced: they were not bound to produce it for his use, and he loses nothing by not sharing in what otherwise would not have existed at all. But it is some hardship to be born into a world and to find all nature’s gifts previously engrossed, and no place left for the new-comer. To reconcile people to this, after they have once admitted into their minds the idea that any moral rights belong to them as human beings, it will always be necessary to convince them that the exclusive appropriation is good for mankind as a whole, themselves included. But this is what no sane human being could be persuaded of."

"[Economic] and social changes, though among the greatest, are not the only forces which shape the course of our species. Ideas are not always the mere signs and effects of social circumstances: they are themselves a power in history."

"Any prejudice whatever will be insurmountable if those who do not share it themselves, truckle to it, and flatter it, and accept it as a law of nature."

"Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends than that good men should look on and do nothing."

"All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility."

"Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time."

"I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being. Those interests, I contend, authorize the subjection of individual spontaneity to external control only in respect to those actions of each which concern the interest of other people."

"If Providence is omnipotent, Providence intends whatever happens, and the fact of its happening proves that providence intended it. If so, everything which a human being can do, is predestined by Providence and is a fulfillment of its design."

"Happiness is the test of al rules of conduct and the end of life. But… this end was only to be attained by not making it the direct end. Those only are happy, I thought, who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way."

"Few learn much from history who do not bring much with them to its study."

"In proportion to the development of his individuality, each person becomes more valuable to himself, and is, therefore, capable of being more valuable to others."

"In all the more advanced communities the great majority of things are worse done by the intervention of government than the individuals most interested in the matter would do them, or cause them to be done, if left to themselves."

"Justice is a name for certain classes of moral rules, which concern the essentials of human well-being more nearly, and are therefore of more absolute obligation, than any other rules for the guidance of life."

"It is not because men’s desires are strong that they act ill; it is because their consciences are weak. There is no natural connection between strong impulses and a weak conscience. The natural connection is the other way."

"In the long-run, the best proof of character is good actions."

"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."

"One person with a belief is equal to a force of ninety-nine who have only interests."

"The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement."

"So natural to mankind is intolerance in whatever they really care bout, that religious freedom has hardly anywhere been practically realized, except where religious indifference, which dislikes to have its peace disturbed by theological quarrels, has added its weight to the scale."

"The cause of profit is that labor produces more than is required for its support."

"The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against their will is to prevent harm to others. Their own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant."

"The moral feelings are not innate, but acquired."

"The effect of custom, in preventing any misgiving respecting the rules of conduct which mankind impose on one another, is all the more complete because the subject is one on which it is not generally considered necessary that reasons should be given, either by one person to others or by each to himself."

"The convictions of the mass of mankind run hand in hand with their interests or with their class feelings."

"The most incessant occupation of the human intellect throughout life is the ascertainment of truth."

"The rules of ordinary international morality imply reciprocity. But barbarians will not reciprocate. They cannot be depended on for observing any rules. Their minds are not capable of so great an effort, nor their will sufficiently under the influence of distant motives. In the next place, nations which are still barbarous have not got beyond the period during which it is likely to be for their benefit that they should be conquered and held in subjection by foreigners."

"Though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; an since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied."

"Will is the child of desire, and passes out of the dominion of its parent only to come under that of habit."

"The true virtue of human beings is fitness to live together as equals; claiming nothing for themselves but what they as freely concede to everyone else; regarding command of any kind as an exceptional necessity, and in all cases a temporary one."

"Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so."

"Protection against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them."

"What 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."

"The progressive principle is antagonistic to the sway of custom. The contest between these two principles, custom and progress, constitutes the chief interest of the history of mankind."

"We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and even if we were sure, it would be an evil still."

"The perpetual obstacle to human advancement is custom."

"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. "

"A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. "

"All action is for the sake of some end; and rules of action, it seems natural to suppose, must take their whole character and color from the end to which they are subservient. "

"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. "

"As for charity, it is a matter in which the immediate effect on the persons directly concerned, and the ultimate consequence to the general good, are apt to be at complete war with one another. "

"He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that."

"All desirable things... are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as a means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain. "

"Popular opinions, on subjects not palpable to sense, are often true, but seldom or never the whole truth."

"That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time. "

"The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time. "

"The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."

"The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign. "

"The general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind. "