John Stuart Mill Quotes

253 quotes in 2870 categories

• In the human mind, one-sidedness has always been the rule, and many-sidedness the exception. Hence, even in revolutions of opinion, one part of the truth…
• A person's taste is as much his own peculiar concern as his opinion or his purse.
• When the people are too much attached to savage independence, to be tolerant of the amount of power to which it is for their good…
• There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is…
• A great statesman is he who knows when to depart from traditions, as well as when to adhere to them.
• If it were felt that the free development of individuality is one of the leading essentials of well-being; that it is not only a coordinate…
• What a country wants to make it richer is never consumption, but production. Where there is the latter, we may be sure that there is…
• The opening of a foreign trade, by making them acquainted with new objects, or tempting them by the easier acquisition of things which they had…
• Liberty lies in the rights of that person whose views you find most odious.
• If two or more instances of the phenomenon under investigation have only one circumstance in common, the circumstance in which alone all the instances agree…
• The cause, then, philosophically speaking, is the sum total of the conditions, positive and negative, taken together; the whole of the contingencies of every description,…
• Of all many-sided subjects, [education] is the one which has the greatest number of sides.
• The doctrine called Philosophical Necessity is simply this: that, given the motives which are present to an individual's mind, and given likewise the character and…
• This is what writers mean when they say that the notion of cause involves the idea of necessity. If there be any meaning which confessedly…
• In this age, the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service.
• All the good of which humanity is capable is comprised in obedience.
• 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…
• There is never any fair and thorough discussion of heretical opinions... The greatest harm done is to those who are not heretics, and whose whole…
• How can great minds be produced in a country where the test of great minds is agreeing in the opinion of small minds?
• Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative.

Browse John Stuart Mill Quotes by Category