"Freedom is not a gift that societies receive ready-made from the hands of nature or of legislators. It is a conquest, slow and painful, which requires of men that they govern their passions, discipline their impulses, and submit to the long apprenticeship of self-command. The savage is not free in the true sense of the word; he is merely ungoverned. To be truly free, one must be capable of governing oneself."

"Intemperance, licentiousness, idleness: these are not merely moral faults in the eyes of the preacher. They are, in the most rigorous sense, destructions of capital. The man who squanders his health, his faculties, and his time is not simply sinning against his own soul; he is impoverishing himself in the most literal and material fashion, depriving himself of the very instruments with which alone he could have won a larger measure of independence."

"The man who lives by violence against his neighbours does not merely injure them; he injures himself. He breaks the chain of mutual services and exchanges from which all wealth derives. He substitutes, for the productive labour that would have enriched both parties, a barren conflict that leaves both poorer than before. Security is not merely a moral good; it is the first condition of all prosperity."

"VORACITY. When the natives of New Holland have killed a seal, says Péron, cries of joy rise on all sides; nothing is thought of but the feast; the ferocious victors group themselves around their victim; it is torn apart on every side at once; each man eats, sleeps, wakes, eats, and sleeps again. INCONTINENCE. The savage has little inclination to pleasure. It is the effect of the rigors of his condition, of the hunger he endures, of the exhausting fatigues he supports. But the savage is cold without being continent; and wherever a less harsh condition renders him more disposed to the pleasures of love, the licentiousness of his morals is excessive. IMPROVIDENCE. The savage, says Robertson, does not think of building a hut until he is compelled by the rigor of the cold, and if the weather softens while he has his hand to the work, he abandons his task unfinished, without thinking that the cold might ever return. When the Carib has slept, he would give his hammock for a trifle; in the evening, he would sacrifice everything to recover it; and the next day, he would give it away again for nothing, without thinking of his regrets of the day before."

"The great transformation of modern civilization may be summarized thus: external discipline is being replaced by interior discipline. The whip gives way to the conscience; the master gives way to the free man who has mastered himself. This is not a diminution of social order; it is social order raised to its highest power, because it no longer requires the costly apparatus of compulsion."