Top 300 John Stuart Mill Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement.”

— John Stuart Mill

152. “We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.”

— John Stuart Mill

153. “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 usually sets while another rises.”

— John Stuart Mill

154. “Was there ever any domination that did not appear natural to those who possessed it?”

— John Stuart Mill

155. “The best state for human nature is that in which, while no one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear from thrust back, by the efforts of others to push themselves forward.”

— John Stuart Mill

156. “Instead of the function of governing, for which it is radically unfit, the proper office of a representative assembly is to watch and control the government.”

— John Stuart Mill

157. “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 that they should be subject, the state of society is not yet ripe for representative government.”

— John Stuart Mill

158. “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. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental or spiritual.”

— John Stuart Mill

159. “All action is for the sake of some end; and rules of action, it seems natural to suppose, must take their whole character and color from the end to which they are subservient.”

— John Stuart Mill

160. “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 as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.”

— John Stuart Mill

161. “The bad workmen who form the majority of the operatives in many branches of industry are decidedly of opinion that bad workmen ought to receive the same wages as good.”

— John Stuart Mill

162. “The strongest of all arguments against the interference of the public with purely personal conduct, is that when it does interfere, the odds are that it interferes wrongly, and in the wrong place.”

— John Stuart Mill

163. “A person’s taste is as much his own peculiar concern as his opinion or his purse.”

— John Stuart Mill

164. “Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their sentiments.”

— John Stuart Mill

165. “All that makes existence valuable to any one depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people.”

— John Stuart Mill

166. “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 exercise of ours.”

— John Stuart Mill

167. “All praise of Civilization, or Art, or Contrivance, is so much dispraise of Nature ; an admission of imperfection, which it is man’s business, and merit, to be always endeavouring to correct or mitigate.”

— John Stuart Mill

168. “Persons of genius, it is true, are, and are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow.”

— John Stuart Mill

169. “A population may be too crowded, though all be amply supplied with food and raiment. It is not good for a man to be kept perforce at all times in the presence of his species...”

— John Stuart Mill

170. “After the primary necessities of food and raiment, freedom is the first and strongest want of human nature.”

— John Stuart Mill

171. “A state of exalted pleasure lasts only moments or in some cases, and with some intermissions, hours or days, and is the occasional brilliant flash of enjoyment, not its permanent and steady flame.”

— John Stuart Mill

172. “We have had the morality of submission, and the morality of chivalry and generosity; the time is now come for the morality of justice.”

— John Stuart Mill

173. “To understand one woman is not necessarily to understand any other woman.”

— John Stuart Mill

174. “The guesses which serve to give mental unity and wholeness to a chaos of scattered particulars, are accidents which rarely occur to any minds but those abounding in knowledge and disciplined in intellectual combinations.”

— John Stuart Mill

175. “Apart from the peculiar tenets of individual thinkers, there is also in the world at large an increasing inclination to stretch unduly the powers of society over the individual, both by the force of opinion and even by that of legislation:.”

— John Stuart Mill

176. “The moral influence of woman over man is almost always salutary.”

— John Stuart Mill

177. “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, are apt to be at complete war with one another.”

— John Stuart Mill

178. “The time appears to me to have come when it is the duty of all to make their dissent from religion known.”

— John Stuart Mill

179. “I am not aware that any community has a right to force another to be civilized.”

— John Stuart Mill

180. “The ne plus ultra of wickedness is embodied in what is commonly presented to mankind as the creed of Christianity.”

— John Stuart Mill

181. “The most cogent reason for restricting the interference of government is the great evil of adding unnecessarily to its power.”

— John Stuart Mill

182. “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

183. “To mistake money for wealth, is the same sort of error as to mistake the highway which may be the easiest way of getting to your house or lands, for the house and lands themselves.”

— John Stuart Mill

184. “All honor to those who can abnegate for themselves the personal enjoyment of life, when by such renunciation they contribute worthily to increase the amount of happiness in the world; but he who does it, or professes to do it, for any other purpose, is no more deserving of admiration than the ascetic mounted on his pillar.”

— John Stuart Mill

185. “Persons of genius are, ex vi termini, more individual than any other people – less capable, consequently, of fitting themselves, without hurtful compression, into any of the small number of moulds which society provides in order to save its members the trouble of forming their character.”

— John Stuart Mill

186. “The idea that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of those pleasant falsehoods, which most experience refutes. History is teeming with instances of truth put down by persecution. If not put down forever, it may be set back for centuries.”

— John Stuart Mill

187. “Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of the representative government, cannot exist.”

— John Stuart Mill

188. “I know tolerably well what Ireland was, but have a very imperfect idea of what Ireland is.”

— John Stuart Mill

189. “Even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds.”

— John Stuart Mill

190. “The struggle between Liberty and Authority is the most conspicuous feature in the portions of history with which we are earliest familiar; particularly in that of Greece, Rome, and England.”

— John Stuart Mill

191. “It is a bitter thought, how different a thing the Christianity of the world might have been, if the Christian faith had been adopted as the religion of the empire under the auspices of Marcus Aurelius instead of those of Constantine.”

— John Stuart Mill

192. “When the “sacredness of property” is talked of, it should always be remembered that any such sacredness does not belong in the same degree to landed property. No man made the land. It is the original inheritance of the whole species.”

— John Stuart Mill

193. “What is characteristic of Socialism is the joint ownership by all the members of the community of the instruments and means of production; which carries with it the consequence that the division of the produce among the body of owners must be a public act, performed according to rules laid down by the community.”

— John Stuart Mill

194. “The idea is essentially repulsive, of a society held together only by the relations and feelings arising out of pecuniary interest.”

— John Stuart Mill

195. “Not even on the most distorted and contracted theory of good which ever was framed by religious or philosophical fanaticism, can the government of Nature be made to resemble the work of a being at once good and omnipotent.”

— John Stuart Mill

196. “It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being.”

— John Stuart Mill

197. “The validity of all the Inductive Methods depends on the assumption that every event, or the beginning of every phenomenon, must have some cause; some antecedent, upon the existence of which it is invariably and unconditionally consequent.”

— John Stuart Mill

198. “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 the present.”

— John Stuart Mill

199. “To prohibit what they think pernicious, is not claiming exemption from error, but fulfilling the duty incumbent on them, although fallible, of acting on their conscientious conviction.”

— John Stuart Mill

200. “All errors which a man is likely to commit against advice are far outweighed by the evil of allowing others to constrain him for his good.”

— John Stuart Mill