Sanctification is like a clumsy, slow walk rather than a light switch that we turn from off to on.
If you would have the slave show the virtues of the freeman, you must first make him free.
There are people into whose heads it never enters to conceive of any better state of society than that which now exists.
The fundamental principle of human action, the law, that is to political economy what the law of gravitation is to physics is that men seek to gratify their desires with the least exertion
one sex of voice in public matters, and that we could in no way so increase the attention , the intelligence and the devotion which may be brought to the solution of social problems as by enfranchising our women.
Private ownership of land is the nether mill-stone. Material progress is the upper mill-stone. Between them, with an increasing pressure, the working classes are being ground.
I am firmly convinced, as I have already said, that to effect any great social improvement, it is sympathy rather than self-interest, the sense of duty rather than the desire for self-advancement, that must be appealed to. Envy is akin to admiration, and it is the admiration that the rich and powerful excite which secures the perpetuation of aristocracies.
Every one is made of matter, and matter is continually going through a chemical change. This change is life, not wisdom, but life, like vegetable or mineral life. Every idea is matter, so of course it contains life in the name of something that can be changed. Motion, or change, is life. Ideas have life. A belief has life, or matter; for it can be changed. Now, all the aforesaid make up man; and all this can be changed.
Just like the old adage--what you dislike most in other people is what you dislike the most in yourself--
Nonviolence in the sense of mere non-killing does not appear to me, therefore, to be of any improvement on the technique of violence.
I take that as an insult, even at 36.