Top 100 John Stuart Mill Quotes
#1. It appears, then, to be a condition of a genuinely scientific hypothesis, that it be not destined always to remain an hypothesis, but be certain to be either proved or disproved by..comparison with observed facts.
John Stuart Mill
#2. To call any proposition certain, while there is any one who would deny its certainty if permitted, but who is not permitted, is to assume that we ourselves, and those who agree with us, are the judges of certainty, and judges without hearing the other side.
John Stuart Mill
#3. It might be plausibly maintained, that in almost every one of the leading controversies, past or present, in social philosophy, both sides were in the right in what they affirmed, though wrong in what they denied.
John Stuart Mill
#4. Examples of truths known to us by immediate consciousness, are our own bodily sensations and mental feelings. I know directly, and of my own knowledge, that I was vexed yesterday, or that I am hungry to-day.
John Stuart Mill
#5. All acts suppose certain dispositions, and habits of mind and heart, which may be in themselves states of enjoyment or of wretchedness, and which must be fruitful in other consequences besides those particular acts.
John Stuart Mill
#6. It is useful while mankind is imperfect that there should be different opinions, so that there should be different experiments of living, that free scope should be given to varieties of character, short of injury to others
John Stuart Mill
#7. The moral influence of woman over man is almost always salutary.
John Stuart Mill
#8. All free communities have both been more exempt from social injustice and crime, and have attained more brilliant prosperity, than any others, or than they themselves after they have lost their freedom.
John Stuart Mill
#9. Over one's mind and over one's body the individual is sovereign.
John Stuart Mill
#10. A stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There could be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress.
John Stuart Mill
#11. The general or prevailing opinion in any subject is rarely or never the whole truth; it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied
John Stuart Mill
#12. The best state for human nature is that in which, while no one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear from thrust back, by the efforts of others to push themselves forward.
John Stuart Mill
#13. Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.
John Stuart Mill
#14. The only names of objects which connote nothing are proper names; and these have, strictly speaking, no signification.
John Stuart Mill
#15. We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and even if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.
John Stuart Mill
#16. I know tolerably well what Ireland was, but have a very imperfect idea of what Ireland is.
John Stuart Mill
#17. The strongest of all arguments against the interference of the public with purely personal conduct, is that when it does interfere, the odds are that it interferes wrongly, and in the wrong place.
John Stuart Mill
#18. He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties.
John Stuart Mill
#19. It would not be easy even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete, than to endeavor so to live that Christ would approve our life.
John Stuart Mill
#20. When one's ideas are not challenged, one's ability to defend them weakens.
John Stuart Mill
#21. Of two pleasures, if there be one which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure.
John Stuart Mill
#23. The general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind.
John Stuart Mill
#24. to secure as much of the advantages of centralised power and intelligence, as can be had without turning into governmental channels too great a proportion of the general activity, is one of the most difficult and complicated questions in the art of government.
John Stuart Mill
#25. To understand one woman is not necessarily to understand any other woman.
John Stuart Mill
#26. The love of power and the love of liberty are in eternal antagonism.
John Stuart Mill
#27. Seeming contentment is real discontent, combined with indolence or self-indulgence, which, while taking no legitimate means of raising itself, delights in bringing others down to its own level.
John Stuart Mill
#28. So natural to mankind is intolerance ... that religious freedom has hardly anywhere been practically realized.
John Stuart Mill
#29. The true virtue of human beings is fitness to live together as equals; claiming nothing for themselves but what they as freely concede to everyone else; regarding command of any kind as an exceptional neccessity, and in all cases a temporary one.
John Stuart Mill
#30. The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.
John Stuart Mill
#31. After the primary necessities of food and raiment, freedom is the first and strongest want of human nature.
John Stuart Mill
#32. That a thing is peculiar; is no argument for its being blamable; since the most criminal actions are to a being like man not more unnatural than most of the virtues.
John Stuart Mill
#33. The sole object of Logic is the guidance of one's own thoughts: the communication of those thoughts to others falls under the consideration of Rhetoric, in the large sense in which that art was conceived by the ancients; or of the still more extensive art of Education.
John Stuart Mill
#34. [A] man and still more the woman, who can be accused either of doing "what nobody does," or of not doing "what everybody does," is the subject of as much depreciatory remark as if he or she had committed some grave moral delinquency.
John Stuart Mill
#35. Imputation; for if the sources of pleasure were precisely the same to human beings and to swine, the
John Stuart Mill
#36. Even a really superior man almost always begins to deteriorate when he is habitually (as the phrase is) king of his company: and in his most habitual company the husband who has a wife inferior to him is always so.
John Stuart Mill
#37. I will call no being good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures; and if such a creature can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go .
John Stuart Mill
#38. Is there any moral enormity which might not be justified by imitation of such a Deity?
John Stuart Mill
#39. To discover to the world something which deeply concerns it, and of which it was previously ignorant; to prove to it that it had been mistaken on some vital point of temporal or spiritual interest, is as important a service as a human being can render to his fellow creatures.
John Stuart Mill
#40. To mistake money for wealth, is the same sort of error as to mistake the highway which may be the easiest way of getting to your house or lands, for the house and lands themselves.
John Stuart Mill
#41. The validity of all the Inductive Methods depends on the assumption that every event, or the beginning of every phenomenon, must have some cause; some antecedent, upon the existence of which it is invariably and unconditionally consequent.
John Stuart Mill
#42. If the universe had a beginning, its beginning, by the very condition of the cases, was supernatural; the laws of Nature cannot account for their own origin.
John Stuart Mill
#43. The duty of man is the same in respect to his own nature as in respect to the nature of all other things, namely not to follow it but to amend it.
John Stuart Mill
#44. A state which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes
will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished.
John Stuart Mill
#46. Was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it? ... the law of force itself, to those who could not plead any other, has always seemed the most natural of all grounds for the exercise of authority.
John Stuart Mill
#47. A world from which solitude is extirpated, is a very poor ideal.
John Stuart Mill
#48. A cultivated mind is one to which the fountains of knowledge have been opened, and which has been taught, in any tolerable degree, to exercise its faculties.
John Stuart Mill
#49. THE time, it is to be hoped, is gone by when any defence would be necessary of the "liberty of the press" as one of the securities against corrupt or tyrannical government.
John Stuart Mill
#50. The necessity of an enumeration of Existences, as the basis of Logic, did not escape the attention of the schoolmen, and of their master Aristotle, the most comprehensive, if not also the most sagacious, of the ancient philosophers.
John Stuart Mill
#51. Among the works of man, which human life is rightly employed in perfecting, the first in importance surely is man himself.
John Stuart Mill
#52. In its narrowest acceptation, order means obedience. A government is said to preserve order if it succeeds in getting itself obeyed.
John Stuart Mill
#53. Laws and systems of polity always begin by recognizing the relations they find already existing between individuals.
John Stuart Mill
#54. The reasons for legal intervention in favour of children apply not less strongly to the case of those unfortunate slaves and victims of the most brutal part of mankind - the lower animals.
John Stuart Mill
#55. Names with indeterminate connotation are not to be confounded with names which have more than one connotation, that is to say, ambiguous words.
John Stuart Mill
#56. I well knew that to propose something which would be called extreme, was the true way not to impede but to facilitate a more moderate experiment.
John Stuart Mill
#57. Governments must be made for human beings as they are, or as they are capable of speedily becoming.
John Stuart Mill
#58. Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of the representative government, cannot exist.
John Stuart Mill
#59. The fourth principal division of names, is into positive and negative. Positive, as man, tree, good; negative, as not-man, not-tree, not-good. To every positive concrete name, a corresponding negative one might be framed.
John Stuart Mill
#60. No one but a fool, and only a fool of a peculiar description, feels offended by the acknowledgment that there are others whose opinion, and even whose wish, is entitled to a greater amount of consideration than his.
John Stuart Mill
#61. No slave is a slave to the same lengths, and in so full a sense of the word, as a wife is.
John Stuart Mill
#62. The employment of the word Logic to denote the theory of Argumentation, is derived from the Aristotelian, or, as they are commonly termed, the scholastic, logicians.
John Stuart Mill
#63. Persons of genius, it is true, are, and are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow.
John Stuart Mill
#64. All action is for the sake of some end; and rules of action, it seems natural to suppose, must take their whole character and color from the end to which they are subservient.
John Stuart Mill
#65. Natural rights, nonsense; natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense, elevated nonsense, nonsense going on stilts.
John Stuart Mill
#66. With equality of experience and of general faculties, a woman usually sees much more than a man of what is immediately before her.
John Stuart Mill
#67. When the people are too much attached to savage independence, to be tolerant of the amount of power to which it is for their good that they should be subject, the state of society is not yet ripe for representative government.
John Stuart Mill
#68. A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury.
John Stuart Mill
#69. It can do truth no service to blind the fact, known to all who have the most ordinary acquaintance with literary history, that a large portion of the noblest and most valuable moral teaching has been the work not only of men who did not know, but of men who knew and rejected the Christian faith.
John Stuart Mill
#70. The besetting danger is not so much of embracing falsehood for truth, as of mistaking a part of the truth for the whole.
John Stuart Mill
#71. There is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides.
John Stuart Mill
#72. The maxim is, that whatever can be affirmed (or denied) of a class, may be affirmed (or denied) of everything included in the class. This axiom, supposed to be the basis of the syllogistic theory, is termed by logicians the dictum de omni et nullo.
John Stuart Mill
#73. The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.
John Stuart Mill
#74. In all intellectual debates, both sides tend to be correct in what they affirm, and wrong in what they deny.
John Stuart Mill
#75. Stupidity is much the same all the world over. A stupid person's notions and feelings may confidently be inferred from those which prevail in the circle by which the person is surrounded. Not so with those whose opinions and feelings are an emanation from their own nature and faculties.
John Stuart Mill
#76. Hardly any original thoughts on mental or social subjects ever make their way among mankind or assume their proper importance in the minds even of their inventors, until aptly selected words or phrases have as it were nailed them down and held them fast.
John Stuart Mill
#77. There is a very real evil consequent on ascribing supernatural origin to the received maxilms of morality. That origin consecrates the whole of them and protects them from being discussed or criticized.
John Stuart Mill
#78. When I say only himself, I mean directly, and in the first instance: for whatever affects himself, may affect others through himself; and the objection which may be grounded on this contingency, will receive consideration in the sequel. This, then, is the appropriate region of human liberty.
John Stuart Mill
#79. Political Economy, in truth, has never pretended to give advice to mankind with no lights but its own; though people who knew nothing but political economy (and therefore knew it ill) have taken upon themselves to advise, and could only do so by such lights as they had.
John Stuart Mill
#80. Even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds
John Stuart Mill
#81. Liberty lies in the rights of that person whose views you find most odious.
John Stuart Mill
#82. Eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard ... All poetry is of the nature of the soliloquy.
John Stuart Mill
#83. It is not because men's desires are strong that they act ill; it is because their consciences are weak.
John Stuart Mill
#84. The names called privative, therefore, connote two things; the absence of certain attributes, and the presence of others, from which the presence also of the former might naturally have been expected.
John Stuart Mill
#85. No one can be a great thinker who does not recognize that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead.
John Stuart Mill
#86. But was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it?
John Stuart Mill
#87. A man of clear ideas errs grievously if he imagines that whatever is seen confusedly does not exist; it belongs to him, when he meets with such a thing, to dispel the midst, and fix the outlines of the vague form which is looming through it.
John Stuart Mill
#88. I had learnt from experience that many false opinions may be exchanged for true ones, without in the least altering the habits of mind of which false opinions are made.
John Stuart Mill
#89. Proposed Roads to Freedom
In this book Russell weighs the respective advantages and disadvantages of Socialism, Marxism and Syndicalism.
John Stuart Mill
#90. The aim, therefore, of patriots, was to set limits to the power which the ruler should be suffered to exercise over the community; and this limitation was what they meant by liberty.
John Stuart Mill
#91. Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think ...
John Stuart Mill
#92. To tax the larger incomes at a higher percentage than the smaller, is to lay a tax on industry and economy; to impose a penalty on people for having worked harder and saved more than their neighbors.
John Stuart Mill
#93. All that makes existence valuable to any one depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people.
John Stuart Mill
#94. As often as a study is cultivated by narrow minds, they will draw from it narrow conclusions.
John Stuart Mill
#95. Names have been further distinguished into univocal and aequivocal: these, however, are not two kinds of names, but two different modes of employing names.
John Stuart Mill
#96. Strong impulses are but another name for energy. Energy may be turned to bad uses; but more good may always be made of an energetic nature, than of an indolent and impassive one.
John Stuart Mill
#97. Everything must be free to be written and published without restraint
John Stuart Mill
#98. The yoke is naturally and necessarily humiliating to all persons, except the one who is on the throne, together with, at most, the one who expects to succeed to it.
John Stuart Mill
#99. The cause, then, philosophically speaking, is the sum total of the conditions, positive and negative, taken together; the whole of the contingencies of every description, which being realized, the consequent invariably follows.
John Stuart Mill
#100. A profound conviction raises a man above the feeling of ridicule.
John Stuart Mill
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