John Stuart Mill Quotes

253 quotes in 2870 categories

• In all the more advanced communities the great majority of things are worse done by the intervention of government than the individuals most interested in…
• A government with all this mass of favours to give or to withhold, however free in name, wields a power of bribery scarcely surpassed by…
• What is contrary to women's nature to do, they never will be made to do by simply giving their nature free play.
• Photography is a brief complicity between foresight and luck.
• Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion.…
• The ne plus ultra of wickedness is embodied in what is commonly presented to mankind as the creed of Christianity.
• The demand for commodities is not the demand for labor.
• Men and governments must act to the best of their ability. There is no such thing as absolute certainty but there is assurance sufficient for…
• In its narrowest acceptation, order means obedience. A government is said to preserve order if it succeeds in getting itself obeyed.
• Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the…
• 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…
• The habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings.
• In this age, the man who dares to think for himself and to act independently does a service to his race.
• The test of real and vigorous thinking, the thinking which ascertains truths instead of dreaming dreams, is successful application to practice.
• [I] put the question directly to myself: "Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which…
• 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.
• Customs are made for customary circumstances, and customary characters.
• He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.
• The peculiarity of the evidence of mathematical truths is that all the argument is on one side.
• 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…

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