Both in a good and a bad sense, the English are farther from a state of nature than any other modern people. They are, more than any other people, a product of civilization and discipline. England is the country in which social discipline has most succeeded, not so much in conquering,as in suppressing, whatever is liable to conflict with it. The English, more than any other people,not only act but feel according to rule.
-John Stuart Mill (1806-73)

From these remarks it will be seen how greatly I differ, at once from those, who seeing the institutions of our ancestors to be bad for us, imagine that they were bad for those for whom they were made.
-John Stuart Mill (1806-73)

The wisest men in every age generally surpass in wisdom the wisest of any preceding age, because the wisest men possess and profit by the constantly increasing accumulation of the ideas of all ages…
-John Stuart Mill (1806-73)

It is a familiar fact, that the vulgar, in all parts
of the world . . . do as their betters do . . .
think as their betters think: and this very
word ‘betters’, is speaking proof of the fact
which we allege - meaning, as it does, not
their ‘wisers’, or their ‘honesters’ but their
‘richers’ and those placed in authority over
them