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 it ought not t… - John Stuart Mill

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...

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. And if no real entity answering to the name could be found, men did not for that reason suppose that none existed, but imagined that it was something peculiarly abstruse and mysterious.

The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally found person to rediscover it, until some of its reappearances falls on a time when from favourable circumstances it escapes persecution until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it.

Az igazság többet nyer azoknak a tévedéseivel, akik kellő felkészülés után a maguk fejével gondolkodnak, mint azoknak az igaz vélekedéseivel, akik csupán azért vélekednek így, mert nem hajlandók magukat gondolkodással gyötörni.