Top 300 John Stuart Mill Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life.”

— John Stuart Mill

52. “It is useful while mankind is imperfect that there should be different opinions, so that there should be different experiments of living, that free scope should be given to varieties of character, short of injury to others.”

— John Stuart Mill

53. “However unwillingly a person who has a strong opinion may admit the possibility that his opinion may be false, he ought to be moved by the consideration that, however true it may be, if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth.”

— John Stuart Mill

54. “The price paid for intellectual pacification is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind.”

— John Stuart Mill

55. “Landlords grow rich in their sleep without working, risking or economizing. The increase in the value of land, arising as it does from the efforts of an entire community, should belong to the community and not to the individual who might hold title.”

— John Stuart Mill

56. “All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.”

— John Stuart Mill

57. “A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another, and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government.”

— John Stuart Mill

58. “The perpetual obstacle to human advancement is custom.”

— John Stuart Mill

59. “Any participation, even in the smallest public function, is useful.”

— John Stuart Mill

60. “Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.”

— John Stuart Mill

61. “The most important thing women have to do is to stir up the zeal of women themselves.”

— John Stuart Mill

62. “The habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings.”

— John Stuart Mill

63. “Induction is a process of inference; it proceeds from the known to the unknown.”

— John Stuart Mill

64. “Laws and systems of polity always begin by recognizing the relations they find already existing between individuals.”

— John Stuart Mill

65. “Marriage is the only actual bondage known to our law. There remain no legal slaves, except the mistress of every house.”

— John Stuart Mill

66. “Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post as soon as there is no enemy in the field.”

— John Stuart Mill

67. “The worth of the state, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it.”

— John Stuart Mill

68. “My father taught me that the question Who made me? cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question, Who made God?”

— John Stuart Mill

69. “Solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur is the cradle of thought and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society can ill do without.”

— John Stuart Mill

70. “So long as an opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses in stability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it.”

— John Stuart Mill

71. “All good things which exist are the fruits of originality.”

— John Stuart Mill

72. “The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.”

— John Stuart Mill

73. “Next to selfishness the principal cause which makes life unsatisfactory is want of mental cultivation.”

— John Stuart Mill

74. “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 pleasure and the absence of pain.”

— John Stuart Mill

75. “The beliefs which we have most warrant for, have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded.”

— John Stuart Mill

76. “The love of power and the love of liberty are in eternal antagonism.”

— John Stuart Mill

77. “Lord, enlighten thou our enemies. Sharpen their wits, give acuteness to their perceptions, and consecutiveness and clearness to their reasoning powers: we are in danger from their folly, not from their wisdom; their weakness is what fills us with apprehension, not their strength.”

— John Stuart Mill

78. “The principle itself of dogmatic religion, dogmatic morality, dogmatic philosophy, is what requires to be booted out; not any particular manifestation of that principle.”

— John Stuart Mill

79. “The object of universities is not to make skillful lawyers, physicians or engineers. It is to make capable and cultivated human beings.”

— John Stuart Mill

80. “The reasons for legal intervention in favour of children apply not less strongly to the case of those unfortunate slaves and victims of the most brutal part of mankind – the lower animals.”

— John Stuart Mill

81. “Customs are made for customary circumstances, and customary characters.”

— John Stuart Mill

82. “In the long-run, the best proof of a good character is good actions.”

— John Stuart Mill

83. “The disease which inflicts bureaucracy and what they usually die from is routine.”

— John Stuart Mill

84. “Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement.”

— John Stuart Mill

85. “That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.”

— John Stuart Mill

86. “What is contrary to women’s nature to do, they never will be made to do by simply giving their nature free play.”

— John Stuart Mill

87. “The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good, in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.”

— John Stuart Mill

88. “Originality is the one thing which unoriginal minds cannot feel the use of.”

— John Stuart Mill

89. “Everyone who receives the protection of society owes a return for the benefit.”

— John Stuart Mill

90. “How can great minds be produced in a country where the test of great minds is agreeing in the opinion of small minds?”

— John Stuart Mill

91. “Among the works of man, which human life is rightly employed in perfecting, the first in importance surely is man himself.”

— John Stuart Mill

92. “There is an imaginary circle drawn around every human being, over which no government should be able to step.”

— John Stuart Mill

93. “Any society which is not improving is deteriorating, and the more so the closer and more familiar it is. Even a really superior man almost always begins to deteriorate when he is habitually king of his company.”

— John Stuart Mill

94. “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.”

— John Stuart Mill

95. “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 injunctions of men.”

— John Stuart Mill

96. “To discover to the world something which deeply concerns it, and of which it was previously ignorant; to prove to it that it had been mistaken on some vital point of temporal or spiritual interest, is as important a service as a human being can render to his fellow creatures.”

— John Stuart Mill

97. “Strong impulses are but another name for energy. Energy may be turned to bad uses; but more good may always be made of an energetic nature, than of an indolent and impassive one.”

— John Stuart Mill

98. “Stupidity is much the same all the world over. A stupid person’s notions and feelings may confidently be inferred from those which prevail in the circle by which the person is surrounded. Not so with those whose opinions and feelings are an emanation from their own nature and faculties.”

— John Stuart Mill

99. “In its narrowest acceptation, order means obedience. A government is said to preserve order if it succeeds in getting itself obeyed.”

— John Stuart Mill

100. “Co-operation, like other difficult things, can be learned only by practice: and to be capable of it in great things, a people must be gradually trained to it in small. Now the whole course of advancing civilization is a series of such training.”

— John Stuart Mill