A necessary consequent of religious belief is the attaching ideas of merit to that belief, and of demerit to its absence.
The simplest principles become difficult of practice, when habits, formed in error, have been fixed by time, and the simplest truths hard to receive when prejudice has warped the mind.
There is but one honest limit to the rights of a sentient being; it is where they touch the rights of another sentient being.
Instead of establishing facts, we have to overthrow errors; instead of ascertaining what is, we have to chase from our imaginations what is not.
It is in vain that we would circumscribe the power of one half of our race, and that half by far the most important and influential.
How are men to be secured in any rights without instruction; how to be secured in the equal exercise of those rights without equality of instruction? By instruction understand me to mean knowledge - just knowledge; not talent, not genius, not inventive mental powers.
