In the progress of science from its easiest to its more difficult problems, each great step in advance has usually had either as its precursor, or as… - John Stuart Mill

But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant — society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it — its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.

Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom. Persons of genius are, ex vi termini,5 more individual than any other people — less capable, consequently, of fitting themselves, without hurtful compression, into any of the small number of moulds which society provides in order to save its members the trouble of forming their own character.

Command and obedience are but unfortunate necessities of human life: society in equality is its normal state.