John Stuart Mill Quotes

253 quotes in 2870 categories

• The disease which inflicts bureaucracy and what they usually die from is routine.
• Pleasure and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends.
• Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the…
• The most cogent reason for restricting the interference of government is the great evil of adding unnecessarily to its power.
• Popular opinions, on subjects not palpable to sense, are often true, but seldom or never the whole truth.
• The duty of man is the same in respect to his own nature as in respect to the nature of all other things, namely not…
• The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.
• The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which…
• As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing,…
• It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being.
• Men might as well be imprisoned, as excluded from the means of earning their bread.
• No slave is a slave to the same lengths, and in so full a sense of the word, as a wife is.
• The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement.
• The fatal tendency of mankind to leave off thinking about a thing when it is no longer doubtful is the cause of half their errors.
• The only power deserving the name is that of masses, and of governments while they make themselves the organ of the tendencies and instincts of…
• We have a right, also, in various ways, to act upon our unfavorable opinion of anyone, not to the oppression of his individuality, but in…
• The dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of the pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces,…
• All political revolutions, not affected by foreign conquest, originate in moral revolutions. The subversion of established institutions is merely one consequence of the previous subversion…
• As for charity, it is a matter in which the immediate effect on the persons directly concerned, and the ultimate consequence to the general good,…
• Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended…

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