It is the hating of a thing when we do know something about it which corrodes the character.

We all have a dark feeling of resistance towards people we have never met, and a profound and manly dislike of the authors we have never read.

It does not harm a man to be certain before opening the books that Whitman is an obscene ranter or that Stevenson is a mere trifler with style.

It is the man who can think these things after he has read the books who must be in a fair way to mental perdition.

Prejudice, in fact, is not so much the great intellectual sin as a thing which we may call, to coin a word, "postjudice," not the bias before the fair trial, but the bias that remains afterwards.