It would be difficult to determine whether the age is growing better or worse; for I think our plays are growing like sermons, and our sermons like p… - Anna Laetitia Barbauld

The cheerful light, the vital air, Are blessings widely given; Let nature's commoners enjoy
The common gifts of heaven.The well-taught philosophic mind
To all compassion gives; Casts round the world an equal eye, And feels for all that lives.<p>If mind, as ancient sages taught, A never dying flame, Still shifts thro' matter's varying forms, In every form the same, Beware, lest in the worm you crush A brother's soul you find; And tremble lest thy luckless hand Dislodge a kindred mind.

Let us confess a truth, humiliating perhaps to human pride;—a very small part only of the opinions of the coolest philosopher are the result of fair reasoning; the rest are formed by his education, his temperament, by the age in which he lives, by trains of thought directed to a particular track through some accidental association—in short, by prejudice.

It is, in truth, the most absurd of all suppositions, that a human being can be educated, or even nourished and brought up, without imbibing numberless prejudices from every thing which passes around him.