John Stuart Mill Quotes

Over one's mind and over one's body the individual is sovereign.

Unquestionably, it is possible to do without happiness; it is done involuntarily by nineteen-twentieths of mankind.

All the good of which humanity is capable is comprised in obedience.

To understand one woman is not necessarily to understand any other woman.

I know tolerably well what Ireland was, but have a very imperfect idea of what Ireland is.

How can great minds be produced in a country where the test of great minds is agreeing in the opinion of small minds?

Names with indeterminate connotation are not to be confounded with names which have more than one connotation, that is to say, ambiguous words.

As often as a study is cultivated by narrow minds, they will draw from it narrow conclusions.

Every great movement must experience three stages: ridicule, discussion, adoption.

Customs are made for customary circumstances, and customary characters.

The disease which inflicts bureaucracy and what they usually die from is routine.

Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.

Command and obedience are but unfortunate necessities of human life: society in equality is its normal state.

It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being.

Pleasure and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends.

Whatever helps to shape the human being - to make the individual what he is, or hinder him from being what he is not - is part of his education.

It is a law, that every event depends on the same law.

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.

The time appears to me to have come when it is the duty of all to make their dissent from religion known.

My father taught me that the question Who made me? cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question, Who made God?

A world from which solitude is extirpated, is a very poor ideal.

The most important thing women have to do is to stir up the zeal of women themselves.

Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement.

Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post as soon as there is no enemy in the field.

The great creative individual ... is capable of more wisdom and virtue than collective man ever can be.

So natural to mankind is intolerance ... that religious freedom has hardly anywhere been practically realized.

Eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard ... All poetry is of the nature of the soliloquy.

A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.

Those only are happy ... who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness,
a crisis in my mental history

The general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind.

The feeling of a direct responsibility of the individual to God is almost wholly a creation of Protestantism.

In its narrowest acceptation, order means obedience. A government is said to preserve order if it succeeds in getting itself obeyed.

The successful conduct of an industrial enterprise requires two quite distinct qualifications: fidelity and zeal.

If any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility.

Laws and systems of polity always begin by recognizing the relations they find already existing between individuals.

The ne plus ultra of wickedness is embodied in what is commonly presented to mankind as the creed of Christianity.

It is not because men's desires are strong that they act ill; it is because their consciences are weak.

Each undervalues that part of the materials of thought with which he is not familiar.

Lest the habit of work should be broken, and a taste for idleness acquired

But was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it?

A person's taste is as much his own peculiar concern as his opinion or his purse.

The despotism of custom is on the wane. We are not content to know that things are; we ask whether they ought to be.

To do as one would be done by, and to love one's neighbour as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality

liberty consists in doing what one desires

In this age, the man who dares to think for himself and to act independently does a service to his race.

Men do not desire to be rich, but to be richer than other men.

Popular opinions, on subjects not palpable to sense, are often true, but seldom or never the whole truth.

The most cogent reason for restricting the interference of government is the great evil of adding unnecessarily to its power.

All attempts by the State to bias the conclusions of its citizens on disputed subjects, are evil.

The pupil who is never required to do what he cannot do, never does what he can do.

Have intercourse with females, acquire wealth.

The concessions of the privileged to the unprivileged are seldom brought about by any better motive than the power of the unprivileged to extort them.

In every respect the burthen is hard on those who attack an almost universal opinion.

The beliefs which we have the most warrant for have no safeguard, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded.

Is there any moral enormity which might not be justified by imitation of such a Deity?

There is no 'one-size-fits-all' way to build an audience.

There is a tolerably general agreement about what a university is not. It is not a place of professional education.

Governments must be made for human beings as they are, or as they are capable of speedily becoming.

One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100,000 who have only interests.

Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative.

It is only in the backward countries of the world that increased production is still an important object.

Photography is a brief complicity between foresight and luck.

The philosophy of reasoning, to be complete, ought to comprise the theory of bad as well as of good reasoning.

Civil, or Social Liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual.

The idea is essentially repulsive, of a society held together only by the relations and feelings arising out of pecuniary interest.

Imputation; for if the sources of pleasure were precisely the same to human beings and to swine, the

The demand for commodities is not the demand for labor.

Everyone who receives the protection of society owes a return for the benefit.

God is a word to express, not our ideas, but the want of them.

It is given to no human being to stereotype a set of truths, and walk safely by their guidance with his mind's eye closed.

I am not aware that any community has a right to force another to be civilized.

When the land is cultivated entirely by the spade and no horses are kept, a cow is kept for every three acres of land.

It would be a great misunderstanding of this doctrine to suppose that it is one of selfish indifference about the well-being of others'.

The study of science teaches young men to think, while study of the classics teaches them to express thought.

So Long as we do not harm others we should be free to think, speak, act, & live as we see fit, without molestation from individuals, law, or gov't.

So true is that unnatural generally means only uncustomary, and that everything which is usual appears natural.

There is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides.

Truth emerges from the clash of adverse ideas.

The only names of objects which connote nothing are proper names; and these have, strictly speaking, no signification.

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.

All good things which exist are the fruits of originality.

Trade is a social act.

No slave is a slave to the same lengths, and in so full a sense of the word, as a wife is.

In all intellectual debates, both sides tend to be correct in what they affirm, and wrong in what they deny.

All that makes existence valuable to any one depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people.

The habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings.

Marriage is the only actual bondage known to our law. There remain no legal slaves, except the mistress of every house.

When one's ideas are not challenged, one's ability to defend them weakens.

The sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable, is that people do actually desire it.

Next to selfishness the principal cause which makes life unsatisfactory is want of mental cultivation.

It is as certain that many opinions, now general, will be rejected by future ages, as it is that many, once general, are rejected by the present.

Define logic as the science which treats of the operations of the human understanding in the pursuit of truth.

With equality of experience and of general faculties, a woman usually sees much more than a man of what is immediately before her.

Liberty lies in the rights of that person whose views you find most odious.

The moment one asks himself whether he is happy, he ceases to be so.

There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home.

The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement.

Life has a certain flavor for those who have fought and risked all that the sheltered and protected can never experience.

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.

Money is a machine for doing quickly and commodiously what would be done, though less quickly and commodiously, without it.