Top 300 John Stuart Mill Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “So true is that unnatural generally means only uncustomary, and that everything which is usual appears natural.”

— John Stuart Mill

202. “The utilitarian morality does recognise in human beings the power of sacrificing their own greatest good for the good of others. It only refuses to admit that the sacrifice is itself a good. A sacrifice which does not increase, or tend to increase, the sum total of happiness, it considers as wasted.”

— John Stuart Mill

203. “A man of clear ideas errs grievously if he imagines that whatever is seen confusedly does not exist; it belongs to him, when he meets with such a thing, to dispel the midst, and fix the outlines of the vague form which is looming through it.”

— John Stuart Mill

204. “All acts suppose certain dispositions, and habits of mind and heart, which may be in themselves states of enjoyment or of wretchedness, and which must be fruitful in other consequences besides those particular acts.”

— John Stuart Mill

205. “First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility. Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of the truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.”

— John Stuart Mill

206. “To refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty.”

— John Stuart Mill

207. “The philosophy of reasoning, to be complete, ought to comprise the theory of bad as well as of good reasoning.”

— John Stuart Mill

208. “There is one plain rule of life. Try thyself unweariedly till thou findest the highest thing thou art capable of doing, faculties and outward circumstances being both duly considered, and then do it.”

— John Stuart Mill

209. “The test of real and vigorous thinking, the thinking which ascertains truths instead of dreaming dreams, is successful application to practice.”

— John Stuart Mill

210. “When I say only himself, I mean directly, and in the first instance: for whatever affects himself, may affect others through himself; and the objection which may be grounded on this contingency, will receive consideration in the sequel. This, then, is the appropriate region of human liberty.”

— John Stuart Mill

211. “There is a tolerably general agreement about what a university is not. It is not a place of professional education.”

— John Stuart Mill

212. “To say that secular means irreligious implies that all the arts and sciences are irreligious, and is very like saying that all professions except that of the law are illegal.”

— John Stuart Mill

213. “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.”

— John Stuart Mill

214. “A person should be free to do as he likes in his own concerns; but he ought not to be free to do as he likes in acting for another, under the pretext that the affairs of the other are his own affairs.”

— John Stuart Mill

215. “Men and governments must act to the best of their ability. There is no such thing as absolute certainty but there is assurance sufficient for the purposes of human life.”

— John Stuart Mill

216. “It is only in the backward countries of the world that increased production is still an important object.”

— John Stuart Mill

217. “To call any proposition certain, while there is any one who would deny its certainty if permitted, but who is not permitted, is to assume that we ourselves, and those who agree with us, are the judges of certainty, and judges without hearing the other side.”

— John Stuart Mill

218. “But society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal Impulses and preferences.”

— John Stuart Mill

219. “What distinguishes the majority of men from the few is their inability to act according to their beliefs.”

— John Stuart Mill

220. “Stupidity is much the same all the world over.”

— John Stuart Mill

221. “Government operations tend to be everywhere alike. With individuals and voluntary associations, on the contrary, there are varied experiments, and endless diversity of experience. What the State can usefully do, is to make itself a central depository, and active circulator and diffuser, of the experience resulting from many trials. Its business is to enable each experimentalist to benefit by the experiments of others, instead of tolerating no experiments but its own.”

— John Stuart Mill

222. “The aim, therefore, of patriots, was to set limits to the power which the ruler should be suffered to exercise over the community; and this limitation was what they meant by liberty.”

— John Stuart Mill

223. “Their conclusion may be true, but it might be false for anything they know: they have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them, and considered what such persons may have to say; and consequently they do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess.”

— John Stuart Mill

224. “The peculiarity of the evidence of mathematical truths is that all the argument is on one side.”

— John Stuart Mill

225. “But the true virtue of human beings is fitness to live together as equals; claiming nothing for themselves but what they freely concede to every one else; regarding command of any kind as an exceptional necessity, and in all cases a temporary one; and preferring, whenever possible, the society of those with whom leading and following can be alternate and reciprocal.”

— John Stuart Mill

226. “When there are persons to be found, who form an exception to the apparent unanimity of the world on any subject, even if the world is in the right, it is always probable that dissentients have something worth hearing to say for themselves, and that truth would lose something by their silence.”

— John Stuart Mill

227. “The great majority of those who speak of perfectibility as a dream, do so because they feel that it is one which would afford them no pleasure if it were realized.”

— John Stuart Mill

228. “What citizens of a free country would listen to any offers of good and skillful administration in return for the abdication of freedom?”

— John Stuart Mill

229. “In all the more advanced communities the great majority of things are worse done by the intervention of government than the individuals most interested in the matter would do them, or cause them to be done, if left to themselves.”

— John Stuart Mill

230. “We have discarded the fixed costumes of our forefathers; every one must still dress like other people, but the fashion may change once or twice a year. We thus take care that when there is change it shall be for change’s sake, and not from any idea of beauty of convenience; for the same idea of beauty or convenience would not strike all the world at the same moment, and be simultaneously thrown aside by all at another moment.”

— John Stuart Mill

231. “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. 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

232. “Names with indeterminate connotation are not to be confounded with names which have more than one connotation, that is to say, ambiguous words.”

— John Stuart Mill

233. “On religion in particular, the time appears to me to have come, when it is a duty of all who, being qualified in point of knowledge, have, on mature consideration, satisfied themselves that the current opinions are not only false, but hurtful, to make their dissent known.”

— John Stuart Mill

234. “I well knew that to propose something which would be called extreme, was the true way not to impede but to facilitate a more moderate experiment.”

— John Stuart Mill

235. “If there are any persons who contest a received opinion, or who will do so if law or opinion will let them, let us thank them for it, open our minds to listen to them, and rejoice that there is some one to do for us what we otherwise ought, if we have any regard for either the certainty or the vitality of our convictions, to do with much greater labour for ourselves.”

— John Stuart Mill

236. “A great statesman is he who knows when to depart from traditions, as well as when to adhere to them.”

— John Stuart Mill

237. “In this age, the man who dares to think for himself and to act independently does a service to his race.”

— John Stuart Mill

238. “If the universe had a beginning, its beginning, by the very condition of the cases, was supernatural; the laws of Nature cannot account for their own origin.”

— John Stuart Mill

239. “As often as a study is cultivated by narrow minds, they will draw from it narrow conclusions.”

— John Stuart Mill

240. “One would almost think that a man’s children were supposed to be literally, and not metaphorically, a part of himself, so jealous is opinion of the smallest interference of law with his absolute and exclusive control over them; more jealous than of almost any interference with his own freedom of action: so much less do the generality of mankind value liberty than power.”

— John Stuart Mill

241. “Since the state must necessarily provide subsistence for the criminal poor while undergoing punishment, not to do the same for the poor who have not offended is to give a premium on crime.”

— John Stuart Mill

242. “The actual existence of the subject of the proposition is therefore only apparently, not really, implied in the predication, if an essential one: we may say, A ghost is a disembodied spirit, without believing in ghosts. But an accidental, or non-essential, affirmation, does imply the real existence of the subject, because in the case of a non-existent subject there is nothing for the proposition to assert.”

— John Stuart Mill

243. “The principles which men profess on any controverted subject are usually a very incomplete exponent of the opinions they really hold.”

— John Stuart Mill

244. “It is historically true that a large proportion of infidels in all ages have been persons of distinguished integrity and honor.”

— John Stuart Mill

245. “It is conceivable that religion may be morally useful without being intellectually sustainable.”

— John Stuart Mill

246. “There are no means of finding what either one person or many can do, but by trying – and no means by which anyone else can discover for them what it is for their happiness to do or leave undone.”

— John Stuart Mill

247. “Hardly any original thoughts on mental or social subjects ever make their way among mankind or assume their proper importance in the minds even of their inventors, until aptly selected words or phrases have as it were nailed them down and held them fast.”

— John Stuart Mill

248. “Judgement is given to men that they may use it. Because it may be used erroneously, are men to be told that they ought not to use it at all?”

— John Stuart Mill

249. “Since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinion that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.”

— John Stuart Mill

250. “Seeming contentment is real discontent, combined with indolence or self-indulgence, which, while taking no legitimate means of raising itself, delights in bringing others down to its own level.”

— John Stuart Mill