Top 100 Quotes About John Stuart Mill
#1. Modern liberalism has many roots. One of the most important is the ideas of a man described by an American critic as 'his satanic free-trade majesty John Stuart Mill' and revered by others.
Alan Ryan
#2. John Stuart Mill declared that tyranny makes men cynical. He did not know that a Republic makes them silent.
Lu Xun
#3. As the philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote, It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are a different opinion, it is because they know only their own side of the question.
Daniel M. Gilbert
#4. John Stuart Mill, "nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another, are nature's every day performances."104
John Zande
#5. Ask yourself whether you are happy', observed the philosopher John Stuart Mill, 'and you cease to be so.' At best, it would appear, happiness can only be glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, not stared at directly.
Oliver Burkeman
#6. I protest against deference to any man, whether John Stuart Mill, or Adam Smith, or Aristotle, being allowed to check inquiry. Our science has become far too much a stagnant one, in which opinions rather than experience and reason are appealed to.
William Stanley Jevons
#7. (The Francophile and radical John Stuart Mill had noted, not long after the Commune fell, in a letter to an English union leader, "an infirmity of the French mind" - that of "being led away by phrases, and treating abstractions as if they were realities which have a will and exert active power.")
Anonymous
#8. It's wrong to treat Muslims as if they will never find their John Stuart Mill. Christianity and Judaism show people can be very dogmatic and then open up.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#9. Still, to paraphrase what John Stuart Mill said about the stupidity of the Tories, while not all people who claim to be politically incorrect are assholes, it's exactly the sort of thing an asshole is apt to say. (183)
Geoffrey Nunberg
#10. The works of John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, and Karl Marx had been forbidden. Students' libraries and clubs had been closed; and informers had been planted in the lecture halls. Entry fees had been raised fivefold to bar academic education to children of poor parents.
Isaac Deutscher
#11. I call myself a liberal - a classical liberal as in John Stuart Mill.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#12. 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
#13. A person whose desires and impulses are his own - are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture - is said to have a character. One whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character, no more than a steam-engine has character ...
John Stuart Mill
#14. What is really inspiriting and ennobling in the doctrine of freewill, is the conviction that we have real power over the formation of our own character; that our will, by influencing some of our circumstances, can modify our future habits or capabilities of willing.
John Stuart Mill
#15. Co-operation, like other difficult things, can be learned only by practice: and to be capable of it in great things, a people must be gradually trained to it in small. Now the whole course of advancing civilization is a series of such training.
John Stuart Mill
#16. We have had the morality of submission, and the morality of chivalry and generosity; the time is now come for the morality of justice.
John Stuart Mill
#17. It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being.
John Stuart Mill
#18. The individual is not accountable to society for his actions in so far as these concern the interests of no person but himself.
John Stuart Mill
#19. To do as one would be done by, and to love one's neighbour as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality
John Stuart Mill
#20. To what a degree this loose mode of classing and denominating objects has rendered the vocabulary of mental and moral philosophy unfit for the purposes of accurate thinking, is best known to whoever has most meditated on the present condition of those branches of knowledge.
John Stuart Mill
#21. 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
#22. All political revolutions, not affected by foreign conquest, originate in moral revolutions. The subversion of established institutions is merely one consequence of the previous subversion of established opinions.
John Stuart Mill
#23. Men might as well be imprisoned, as excluded from the means of earning their bread.
John Stuart Mill
#25. There have been, and may be again, great individual thinkers, in a general atmosphere of mental slavery.
John Stuart Mill
#26. 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
#27. There is one plain rule of life. Try thyself unweariedly till thou findest the highest thing thou art capable of doing, faculties and outward circumstances being both duly considered, and then do it.
John Stuart Mill
#28. Instead of the function of governing, for which it is radically unfit, the proper office of a representative assembly is to watch and control the government.
John Stuart Mill
#29. 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
#30. To say that secular means irreligious implies that all the arts and sciences are irreligious, and is very like saying that all professions except that of the law are illegal.
John Stuart Mill
#31. Any society which is not improving is deteriorating, and the more so the closer and more familiar it is. Even a really superior man almost always begins to deteriorate when he is habitually king of his company.
John Stuart Mill
#32. 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
#33. It is contrary to reason and experience to suppose that there can be any real check to brutality, consistent with leaving the victim still in the power of the executioner.
John Stuart Mill
#34. 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
#35. The moral influence of woman over man is almost always salutary.
John Stuart Mill
#36. But society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal Impulses and preferences.
John Stuart Mill
#37. Human beings are no longer born to their place in life, and chained down by an inexorable bond to the place they are born to, but are free to employ their faculties, and such favourable chances as offer, to achieve the lot which may appear to them most desirable.
John Stuart Mill
#39. 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
#40. A person's taste is as much his own peculiar concern as his opinion or his purse.
John Stuart Mill
#41. Mill was very clear on this point: offence should not be confused with harm.
Nigel Warburton
#42. A person should be free to do as he likes in his own concerns; but he ought not to be free to do as he likes in acting for another, under the pretext that the affairs of the other are his own affairs.
John Stuart Mill
#43. Over one's mind and over one's body the individual is sovereign.
John Stuart Mill
#44. Truths are known to us in two ways: some are known directly, and of themselves; some through the medium of other truths. The former are the subject of Intuition, or Consciousness; 4 the latter, of Inference.
John Stuart Mill
#45. All praise of Civilization, or Art, or Contrivance, is so much dispraise of Nature ; an admission of imperfection, which it is man's business, and merit, to be always endeavouring to correct or mitigate.
John Stuart Mill
#46. The utilitarian morality does recognise in human beings the power of sacrificing their own greatest good for the good of others. It only refuses to admit that the sacrifice is itself a good. A sacrifice which does not increase, or tend to increase, the sum total of happiness, it considers as wasted.
John Stuart Mill
#47. 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
#48. The great creative individual ... is capable of more wisdom and virtue than collective man ever can be.
John Stuart Mill
#49. It is a bitter thought, how different a thing the Christianity of the world might have been, if the Christian faith had been adopted as the religion of the empire under the auspices of Marcus Aurelius instead of those of Constantine.
John Stuart Mill
#50. Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion, is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action; and on no other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right.
John Stuart Mill
#51. But these few are the salt of the earth; without them, human life would become a stagnant pool. Not only is it they who introduce good things which did not before exist, it is they who keep the life in those which already existed.
John Stuart Mill
#52. .all the moralities tell them that it is the duty of women, and all the current sentimentalities that it is their nature, to live for others; to make complete abnegation of themselves, and to have no life but their affections. - The Subjection of Women
John Stuart Mill
#53. 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
#56. So much barbarism, however, still remains in the transactions of most civilized nations, that almost all independent countries choose to assert their nationality by having, to their inconvenience and that of their neighbors, a peculiar currency of their own.
John Stuart Mill
#57. Originality is the one thing which unoriginal minds cannot feel the use of.
John Stuart Mill
#58. 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
#59. It is conceivable that religion may be morally useful without being intellectually sustainable.
John Stuart Mill
#60. The object of universities is not to make skillful lawyers, physicians or engineers. It is to make capable and cultivated human beings
John Stuart Mill
#61. 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
#62. The only names of objects which connote nothing are proper names; and these have, strictly speaking, no signification.
John Stuart Mill
#63. An example of this is, when the simple propositions are connected by the particle or; as, either A is B or C is D; or by the particle if; as, A is B if C is D. In the former case, the proposition is called disjunctive, in the latter, conditional: the name hypothetical was originally common to both.
John Stuart Mill
#64. What is contrary to women's nature to do, they never will be made to do by simply giving their nature free play.
John Stuart Mill
#65. Language is evidently one of the principle instruments or helps of thought; and any imperfection in the instrument, or in the mode of employing it, is confessedly liable, still more than in almost any other art, to confuse and impede the process, and destroy all ground of confidence in the result.
John Stuart Mill
#66. And it is not difficult to show, by abundant instances, that to extend the bounds of what may be called moral police, until it encroaches on the most unquestionably legitimate liberty of the individual, is one of the most universal of all human propensities.
John Stuart Mill
#67. 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
#68. If religious belief be indeed so necessary to mankind, as we are continually assured that it is, there is great reason to lament, that the intellectual grounds of it should require to be backed by moral bribery or subornation of the understanding.
John Stuart Mill
#69. I know tolerably well what Ireland was, but have a very imperfect idea of what Ireland is.
John Stuart Mill
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. When one's ideas are not challenged, one's ability to defend them weakens.
John Stuart Mill
#74. The assumption that we are infallible can we justify the suppression of opinions we think false. Ages are as fallible as individuals, every age having held many opinions which subsequent ages have deemed not only false but absurd.
John Stuart Mill
#75. A great statesman is he who knows when to depart from traditions, as well as when to adhere to them.
John Stuart Mill
#76. When the "sacredness of property" is talked of, it should always be remembered that any such sacredness does not belong in the same degree to landed property. No man made the land. It is the original inheritance of the whole species.
John Stuart Mill
#77. Each undervalues that part of the materials of thought with which he is not familiar.
John Stuart Mill
#78. The successful conduct of an industrial enterprise requires two quite distinct qualifications: fidelity and zeal.
John Stuart Mill
#79. Either A is B or C is D," means, "if A is not B, C is D; and if C is not D, A is B." All hypothetical propositions, therefore, though disjunctive in form, are conditional in meaning; and the words hypothetical and conditional may be, as indeed they generally are, used synonymously.
John Stuart Mill
#80. 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
#81. The price paid for intellectual pacification is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind.
John Stuart Mill
#83. It would be a great misunderstanding of this doctrine to suppose that it is one of selfish indifference about the well-being of others'.
John Stuart Mill
#84. To refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty.
John Stuart Mill
#85. All good things which exist are the fruits of originality.
John Stuart Mill
#86. All errors which a man is likely to commit against advice are far outweighed by the evil of allowing others to constrain him for his good.
John Stuart Mill
#87. What the State can usefully do is to make itself a central depository, and active circulator and diffuser, of the experience resulting from many trials. Its business is to enable each experimentalist to benefit by the experiments of others, instead of tolerating no experiments but its own.
John Stuart Mill
#88. There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home.
John Stuart Mill
#89. However unwillingly a person who has a strong opinion may admit the possibility that his opinion may be false, he ought to be moved by the consideration that, however true it may be, if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth.
John Stuart Mill
#90. The general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind.
John Stuart Mill
#91. A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.
John Stuart Mill
#92. The test of real and vigorous thinking, the thinking which ascertains truths instead of dreaming dreams, is successful application to practice.
John Stuart Mill
#93. The despotism of custom is on the wane. We are not content to know that things are; we ask whether they ought to be.
John Stuart Mill
#94. All ideas need to be heard, because each idea contains one aspect of the truth. By examining that aspect, we add to our own idea of the truth. Even ideas that have no truth in them whatsoever are useful because by disproving them, we add support to our own ideas.
John Stuart Mill
#95. Civil, or Social Liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual.
John Stuart Mill
#96. It is part of the irony of life that the strongest feelings of devoted gratitude of which human nature seems to be susceptible, are called forth in human beings towards those who, having the power entirely to crush their earthly existence, voluntarily refrain from using that power.
John Stuart Mill
#97. The application of algebra to geometry ... has immortalized the name of Descartes, and constitutes the greatest single step ever made in the progress of the exact sciences.
John Stuart Mill
#98. 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
#99. A being who can create a race of men devoid of real freedom and inevitably foredoomed to be sinners, and then punish them for being what he has made them, may be omnipotent and various other things, but he is not what the English language has always intended by the adjective holy.
John Stuart Mill
#100. To understand one woman is not necessarily to understand any other woman.
John Stuart Mill
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