I came across this wonderful John Stuart Mill quote by in a comment by Ray Mangum at Roderick Long’s great blog, The Austro-Athenian Empire:

The spirit of improvement is not always a spirit of liberty, for it may aim at forcing improvements on an unwilling people; and the spirit of liberty, in so far as it resists such attempts, may ally itself locally and temporarily with the opponents of improvement; but the only unfailing and permanent source of improvement is liberty, since by it there are as many possible independent centres of improvement as there are individuals.