What does this quote mean?

“Society in equality is its normal state.”

Mill contrasts relations organized around command and obedience with equal association, presenting equality as the normal direction of an improving society.

Source note: The Subjection of Women, discussion of marriage and moral cultivation; the sentence follows Mill’s contrast between older command-and-obedience relations and society among equals.

“What dost thou think most humane?—To spare a person shame.”

The compact answer makes restraint from humiliating another person a test of humane conduct and sensitivity to dignity.

Source note: The Joyful Wisdom, aphorism 274; Thomas Common translation.

“Man is not the enemy of man, but through the medium of a false system of Government.”

Paine attributes much social conflict to institutions and inherited political systems rather than treating hostility as an unavoidable feature of human nature.

Source note: Rights of Man, Part II; represented from the Conway public-domain collection.

“Great part of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect of government.”

Paine argues that everyday social order also grows from mutual dependence, custom, exchange, and cooperation rather than being created entirely by government.

Source note: Rights of Man, Part II; the surrounding passage attributes much ordinary social coordination to society itself.

“What is toleration? It is the appurtenance of humanity. We are all full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other our follies—it is the first law of nature.”

Voltaire begins toleration from shared human fallibility: recognizing that everyone is capable of error weakens the claim that disagreement should be answered with persecution.

Source note: A Philosophical Dictionary, article “Toleration,” Project Gutenberg #35630. The section moves immediately into examples of people from different religious traditions trading together without attacking one another, placing the maxim inside Voltaire’s campaign against religious persecution.

“To define is to limit.”

Definitions clarify ideas but can also narrow them, especially when a label is treated as the complete reality of a person or experience.

Source note: The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891 edition, Chapter 17; Lord Henry answers the Duchess of Monmouth’s question “What are you?” with “To define is to limit.”