John Stuart Mill Quotes

253 quotes in 2870 categories

• Liberty consists in doing what one desires.
• So Long as we do not harm others we should be free to think, speak, act, & live as we see fit, without molestation from…
• We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would…
• What citizens of a free country would listen to any offers of good and skillful administration in return for the abdication of freedom?
• 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,…
• To understand one woman is not necessarily to understand any other woman.
• Human beings are not like sheep; and even sheep are not undistinguishably alike. A man cannot get a coat or a pair oboots to fit…
• 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…
• The spirit of improvement is not always a spirit of liberty, for it may aim at forcing improvements on an unwilling people.
• Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to…
• Accordingly, France Had Voltaire, and his school of negative thinkers, and England (or rather Scotland) had the profoundest negative thinker on record, David Hume: a…
• 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…
• The process of tracing regularity in any complicated, and at first sight confused, set of appearances, is necessarily tentative; we begin by making any supposition,…
• 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…
• The most important thing women have to do is to stir up the zeal of women themselves.
• All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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 study of science teaches young men to think, while study of the classics teaches them to express thought.

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