The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or being, having an independent existence of its own. … - John Stuart Mill

All social inequalities which have ceased to be considered expedient, assume the character not of simple inexpediency, but of injustice, and appear so tyrannical, that people are apt to wonder how they ever could have been tolerated; forgetful that they themselves perhaps tolerate other inequalities under an equally mistaken notion of expediency, the correction of which would make that which they approve seem quite as monstrous as what they have at last learnt to condemn. The entire history of social improvement has been a series of transitions, by which one custom or institution after another, from being a supposed primary necessity of social existence, has passed into the rank of a universally stigmatised injustice and tyranny. So it has been with the distinctions of slaves and freemen, nobles and serfs, patricians and plebeians; and so it will be, and in part already is, with the aristocracies of colour, race, and sex.

No one can be a great thinker who does not recognize, that as a thinker his first duty is to follow his intellect wherever it may lead. Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions if those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think.

There is no reason that all human existence should be constructed on some one or some small number of patterns. [...] A man cannot get a coat or a pair of boots to fit him, unless they are either made to his measure, or he has a whole warehouseful to choose from: and is it easier to fit him with a life than with a coat, or are human beings more like one another in their whole physical and spiritual conformation than in the shape of their feet?