Top 300 John Stuart Mill Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than in attempting to satisfy them.”

— John Stuart Mill

Featured in: Desire Quotes

2. “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.”

— John Stuart Mill

Featured in: Satisfaction Quotes

3. “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.”

— John Stuart Mill

Featured in: Duty Quotes

4. “Landlords grow rich in their sleep without working, risking or economising.”

— John Stuart Mill

5. “Over one’s mind and over one’s body the individual is sovereign.”

— John Stuart Mill

6. “One person with a belief is equal to ninety-nine who have only interests.”

— John Stuart Mill

7. “It is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.”

— John Stuart Mill

8. “Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.”

— John Stuart Mill

9. “Language is the light of the mind.”

— John Stuart Mill

10. “When one’s ideas are not challenged, one’s ability to defend them weakens.”

— John Stuart Mill

11. “Truth emerges from the clash of adverse ideas.”

— John Stuart Mill

12. “The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.”

— John Stuart Mill

13. “Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom.”

— John Stuart Mill

14. “A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury.”

— John Stuart Mill

15. “Liberty lies in the rights of that person whose views you find most odious.”

— John Stuart Mill

16. “Every great movement must experience three stages: ridicule, discussion, adoption.”

— John Stuart Mill

17. “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.”

— John Stuart Mill

Featured in: Patriotic Quotes

18. “A cultivated mind is one to which the fountains of knowledge have been opened, and which has been taught, in any tolerable degree, to exercise its faculties.”

— John Stuart Mill

19. “A profound conviction raises a man above the feeling of ridicule.”

— John Stuart Mill

20. “The study of science teaches young men to think, while study of the classics teaches them to express thought.”

— John Stuart Mill

21. “Men do not desire to be rich, but to be richer than other men.”

— John Stuart Mill

22. “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 merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”

— John Stuart Mill

23. “I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.”

— John Stuart Mill

24. “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.”

— John Stuart Mill

25. “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.”

— John Stuart Mill

26. “Whatever helps to shape the human being – to make the individual what he is, or hinder him from being what he is not – is part of his education.”

— John Stuart Mill

27. “If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”

— John Stuart Mill

28. “The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.”

— John Stuart Mill

29. “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 on people for having worked harder and saved more than their neighbors.”

— John Stuart Mill

30. “Liberty consists in doing what one desires.”

— John Stuart Mill

31. “Sometimes you hit a point where you either change or self destruct.”

— John Stuart Mill

32. “A state which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes – will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished.”

— John Stuart Mill

33. “There is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides.”

— John Stuart Mill

34. “Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative.”

— John Stuart Mill

35. “A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.”

— John Stuart Mill

36. “A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.”

— John Stuart Mill

37. “No one can be a great thinker who does not recognize that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead.”

— John Stuart Mill

38. “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, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.”

— John Stuart Mill

39. “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, which being realized, the consequent invariably follows.”

— John Stuart Mill

40. “Life has a certain flavor for those who have fought and risked all that the sheltered and protected can never experience.”

— John Stuart Mill

41. “Every man who says frankly and fully what he thinks is so far doing a public service. We should be grateful to him for attacking most unsparingly our most cherished opinions.”

— John Stuart Mill

42. “There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home.”

— John Stuart Mill

43. “Strange it is that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free speech but object to their being “pushed to an extreme”, not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case.”

— John Stuart Mill

44. “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 the rest.”

— John Stuart Mill

45. “It is part of the irony of life that the strongest feelings of devoted gratitude of which human nature seems to be susceptible, are called forth in human beings towards those who, having the power entirely to crush their earthly existence, voluntarily refrain from using that power.”

— John Stuart Mill

46. “I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally Conservative. I believe that to be so obvious and undeniable a fact that I hardly think any hon. Gentleman will question it.”

— John Stuart Mill

47. “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.”

— John Stuart Mill

48. “Everything must be free to be written and published without restraint.”

— John Stuart Mill

49. “He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.”

— John Stuart Mill

50. “Political Economy as a branch of science is extremely modern; but the subject with which its enquiries are conversant has in all ages necessarily constituted one of the chief practical interests of mankind.”

— John Stuart Mill