John Stuart Mill

"The great writers to whom the world owes what religious liberty it possesses, have mostly asserted freedom of conscience as an indefeasible right, and denied absolutely that a human being is accountable to others for his religious belief."

"Whenever the general disposition of the people is such, that each individual regards those only of his interests which are selfish, and does not dwell on, or concern himself for, his share of the general interest, in such a state of things, good government is impossible."

"[T]he speaker with whom I was most struck, though I dissented from nearly every word he said, was Thirlwall , the historian, since Bishop of St. David's, then a Chancery barrister, unknown except by a high reputation for eloquence acquired at the Cambridge Union before the era of Austin and Macaulay . His speech was in answer to one of mine. Before he had uttered ten sentences, I set him down as the best speaker I had ever heard, and I have never since heard any one whom I placed above him."

"liberals such as Mill, and later socialists and feminists of different political sympathies, likened women's situation within marriage and their deprivation of civil rights to the state of slavery. As Mill expressed it in The Subjection of Women, a text that was first published in 1861, the year of the outbreak of the American Civil War, 'no slave is a slave to the same lengths, and in so full a sense of the word, as a wife is'."

"Reformers like Mill saw women's oppression as a 'relic of the past...discordant with the future and which must necessarily disappear.'"

"If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."