John Stuart Mill Quotes

253 quotes in 2870 categories

• The natural tendency of representative government, as of modern civilisation, is towards collective mediocrity: and this tendency is increased by all reductions and extensions of…
• Any participation, even in the smallest public function, is useful.
• On religion in particular, the time appears to me to have come, when it is a duty of all who, being qualified in point of…
• In proportion to the development of his individuality, each person becomes more valuable to himself, and is therefore capable of being more valuable to others.…
• History shows that great economic and social forces flow like a tide over communities only half conscious of that which is befalling them. Wise statesmen…
• The great creative individual . . . is capable of more wisdom and virtue than collective man ever can be.
• 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…
• 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 equality of experience and of general faculties, a woman usually sees much more than a man of what is immediately before her.
• Since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinion…
• Not the violent conflict between parts of the truth, but the quiet suppression of half of it, is the formidable evil; there is always hope…
• When the land is cultivated entirely by the spade and no horses are kept, a cow is kept for every three acres of land.
• There is no 'one-size-fits-all' way to build an audience.
• No longer enslaved or made dependent by force of law, the great majority are so by force of property; they are still chained to a…
• ...it is not only the general principles of justice that are infringed, or at least set aside, by the exclusion of women, merely as women,…
• They who know how to employ opportunities will often find that they can create them; and what we can achieve depends less on the amount…
• Laws and systems of polity always begin by recognizing the relations they find already existing between individuals.
• 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…
• The struggle between Liberty and Authority is the most conspicuous feature in the portions of history with which we are earliest familiar; particularly in that…
• Language is the light of the mind

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