Top 300 John Stuart Mill Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Among the facts of the universe to be accounted for, it may be said, is Mind; and it is self evident that nothing can have produced Mind but Mind.”

— John Stuart Mill

102. “The individual is not accountable to society for his actions in so far as these concern the interests of no person but himself.”

— John Stuart Mill

103. “It is a law, that every event depends on the same law.”

— John Stuart Mill

104. “Every one is degraded, whether aware of it or not, when other people, without consulting him, take upon themselves unlimited power to regulate his destiny.”

— John Stuart Mill

105. “The average condition of the people improving or deteriorating, depends upon whether population is advancing faster than improvement, or improvement than population.”

— John Stuart Mill

106. “There is a very real evil consequent on ascribing supernatural origin to the received maxilms of morality. That origin consecrates the whole of them and protects them from being discussed or criticized.”

— John Stuart Mill

107. “It is given to no human being to stereotype a set of truths, and walk safely by their guidance with his mind’s eye closed.”

— John Stuart Mill

108. “With equality of experience and of general faculties, a woman usually sees much more than a man of what is immediately before her.”

— John Stuart Mill

109. “All the good of which humanity is capable is comprised in obedience.”

— John Stuart Mill

110. “He who lets the world choose his plan of life for him has need of no other faculty than that of ape-like imitation.”

— John Stuart Mill

111. “Whatever crushes individuality is despotism.”

— John Stuart Mill

112. “There is always need of persons not only to discover new truths, and point out when what were once truths are true no longer, but also to commence new practices, and set the example of more enlightened conduct, and better taste and sense in human life.”

— John Stuart Mill

113. “Art is the employent of the powers of nature for an end.”

— John Stuart Mill

114. “The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it.”

— John Stuart Mill

115. “Photography is a brief complicity between foresight and luck.”

— John Stuart Mill

116. “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, but which all experience refutes.”

— John Stuart Mill

117. “Education makes a man a more intelligent shoemaker, if that be his occupation, but not by teaching him how to make shoes; it does so by the mental exercise it gives, and the habits it impresses.”

— John Stuart Mill

118. “Money is a machine for doing quickly and commodiously what would be done, though less quickly and commodiously, without it.”

— John Stuart Mill

119. “Trade is a social act. Whoever undertakes to sell any description of any goods to the public, does what affects the interest of other persons, and of society in general; and thus his conduct, in principal, comes within the jurisdiction of society.”

— John Stuart Mill

120. “That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That 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.”

— John Stuart Mill

121. “The happiness which they meant was not a life of rapture, but moments of such, in an existence made up of few and transitory pains, many and various pleasures, with a decided predominance of the active over the passive, and having as the foundation of the whole not to expect more from life than it is capable of bestowing.”

— John Stuart Mill

122. “In this age, the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric.”

— John Stuart Mill

123. “The spirit of improvement is not always a spirit of liberty, for it may aim at forcing improvements on an unwilling people.”

— John Stuart Mill

124. “I will call no being good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures; and if such a creature can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go .”

— John Stuart Mill

125. “A democratic constitution, not supported by democratic institutions in detail, but confined to the central government, not only is not political freedom, but often creates a spirit precisely the reverse, carrying down to the lowest grade in society the desire and ambition of political domination.”

— John Stuart Mill

126. “It is not because men’s desires are strong that they act ill; it is because their consciences are weak.”

— John Stuart Mill

127. “THE time, it is to be hoped, is gone by when any defence would be necessary of the “liberty of the press” as one of the securities against corrupt or tyrannical government.”

— John Stuart Mill

128. “The general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind.”

— John Stuart Mill

129. “In this age, the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service.”

— John Stuart Mill

130. “In all intellectual debates, both sides tend to be correct in what they affirm, and wrong in what they deny.”

— John Stuart Mill

131. “No slave is a slave to the same lengths, and in so full a sense of the word, as a wife is.”

— John Stuart Mill

132. “There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ way to build an audience.”

— John Stuart Mill

133. “And it is not difficult to show, by abundant instances, that to extend the bounds of what may be called moral police, until it encroaches on the most unquestionably legitimate liberty of the individual, is one of the most universal of all human propensities.”

— John Stuart Mill

134. “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. A man who has nothing which he cares about more than he does about his personal safety is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the existing of better men than himself.”

— John Stuart Mill

135. “The pupil who is never required to do what he cannot do, never does what he can do.”

— John Stuart Mill

136. “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 to follow it but to amend it.”

— John Stuart Mill

137. “The sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable, is that people do actually desire it.”

— John Stuart Mill

138. “Of two pleasures, if there be one which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure.”

— John Stuart Mill

139. “The world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments, of those distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue, are complete sceptics in religion.”

— John Stuart Mill

140. “The true virtue of human beings is fitness to live together as equals; claiming nothing for themselves but what they as freely concede to everyone else; regarding command of any kind as an exceptional neccessity, and in all cases a temporary one.”

— John Stuart Mill

141. “Pleasure and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends.”

— John Stuart Mill

142. “No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought.”

— John Stuart Mill

143. “It would be a great misunderstanding of this doctrine to suppose that it is one of selfish indifference about the well-being of others’.”

— John Stuart Mill

144. “In proportion to the development of his individuality, each person becomes more valuable to others. There is a greater fullness of life about his own existence, and when there is more life in the units there is more in the mass which is composed of them.”

— John Stuart Mill

145. “To do as one would be done by, and to love one’s neighbour as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality.”

— John Stuart Mill

146. “Men are men before they are lawyers, or physicians, or merchants, or manufacturers; and if you make them capable and sensible men, they will make themselves capable and sensible lawyers or physicians.”

— John Stuart Mill

147. “But these few are the salt of the earth; without them, human life would become a stagnant pool. Not only is it they who introduce good things which did not before exist, it is they who keep the life in those which already existed.”

— John Stuart Mill

148. “Society between equals can only exist on the understanding that the interests of all are to be regarded equally.”

— John Stuart Mill

149. “Who can compute what the world loses in the multitude of promising intellects combined with timid characters, who dare not follow out any bold, vigorous, independent train of thought, lest it should land them in something which would admit of being considered irreligious or immoral?”

— John Stuart Mill

150. “What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing – the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others.”

— John Stuart Mill