Top 300 John Stuart Mill Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “Social Liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual. A question seldom stated, and hardly ever discussed, in general terms, but which profoundly influences the practical controversies of the age by its latent presence, and is likely soon to make itself recognised as the vital question of the future.”

— John Stuart Mill

252. “Almost all rich veins of original and striking speculation have been opened by systematic half-thinkers.”

— John Stuart Mill

253. “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

254. “The form of association, however, which if mankind continue to improve, must be expected in the end to predominate, is not that which can exist between a capitalist as chief, and work-people without a voice in the management, but the association of the labourers themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning the capital with which they carry on their operations, and working under managers elected and removable by themselves.”

— John Stuart Mill

255. “Men might as well be imprisoned, as excluded from the means of earning their bread.”

— John Stuart Mill

256. “When the land is cultivated entirely by the spade and no horses are kept, a cow is kept for every three acres of land.”

— John Stuart Mill

257. “God is a word to express, not our ideas, but the want of them.”

— John Stuart Mill

258. “But there is no parity between the feeling of a person for his own opinion, and the feeling of another who is offended at his holding it; no more than between the desire of a thief to take a purse, and the desire of the right owner to keep it. And a person’s taste is as much his own peculiar concern as his opinion or his purse.”

— John Stuart Mill

259. “It does not occur to them to have any inclination, except for what is customary. Thus the mind itself is bowed to the yoke: even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they like in crowds; they exercise choice only among things commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes: until by dint of not following their own nature, they have no nature to follow.”

— John Stuart Mill

260. “Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion, is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action; and on no other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right.”

— John Stuart Mill

261. “Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.”

— John Stuart Mill

262. “So much barbarism, however, still remains in the transactions of most civilized nations, that almost all independent countries choose to assert their nationality by having, to their inconvenience and that of their neighbors, a peculiar currency of their own.”

— John Stuart Mill

263. “Is there any moral enormity which might not be justified by imitation of such a Deity?”

— John Stuart Mill

264. “It can do truth no service to blind the fact, known to all who have the most ordinary acquaintance with literary history, that a large portion of the noblest and most valuable moral teaching has been the work not only of men who did not know, but of men who knew and rejected the Christian faith.”

— John Stuart Mill

265. “A stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There could be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress.”

— John Stuart Mill

266. “If religious belief be indeed so necessary to mankind, as we are continually assured that it is, there is great reason to lament, that the intellectual grounds of it should require to be backed by moral bribery or subornation of the understanding.”

— John Stuart Mill

267. “All attempts by the State to bias the conclusions of its citizens on disputed subjects, are evil.”

— John Stuart Mill

268. “The successful conduct of an industrial enterprise requires two quite distinct qualifications: fidelity and zeal.”

— John Stuart Mill

269. “This, however, only shows that there is an ambiguity in the word is; a word which not only performs the function of the copula in affirmations, but has also a meaning of its own, in virtue of which it may itself be made the predicate of a proposition.”

— John Stuart Mill

270. “Every function superadded to those already exercised by the government causes its influence over hopes and fears to be more widely diffused, and converts, more and more, the active and ambitious part of the public into hangers-on of the government, or of some party which aim, at becoming the government.”

— John Stuart Mill

271. “When we predicate of any thing an abstract name, we affirm of the thing that it is one or other of these five things; that it is a case of Existence, or of Co-existence, or of Causation, or of Sequence, or of Resemblance.”

— John Stuart Mill

272. “No one can be a great thinker who does not recognize, that as a thinker his first duty is to follow his intellect wherever it may lead. Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions if those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think.”

— John Stuart Mill

273. “It might be plausibly maintained, that in almost every one of the leading controversies, past or present, in social philosophy, both sides were in the right in what they affirmed, though wrong in what they denied.”

— John Stuart Mill

274. “Whatever we may think or affect to think of the present age, we cannot get out of it; we must suffer with its sufferings, and enjoy with its enjoyments; we must share in its lot, and, to be either useful or at ease, we must even partake its character.”

— John Stuart Mill

275. “Are names more properly said to be the names of things, or of our ideas of things? The first is the expression in common use; the last is that of some metaphysicians, who conceived that in adopting it they were introducing a highly important distinction.”

— John Stuart Mill

276. “The feeling of a direct responsibility of the individual to God is almost wholly a creation of Protestantism.”

— John Stuart Mill

277. “It is with philosophy as with religion : men marvel at the absurdity of other people’s tenets, while exactly parallel absurdities remain in their own.”

— John Stuart Mill

278. “It is useless for me to say that those who maintain the doctrine that men have a right to command and women are under an obligation to obey, or that men are fit for government and women unfit, are on the affirmative side of the question, and that they are bound to show positive evidence for the assertions, or submit to their rejection.”

— John Stuart Mill

279. “Miracles have no claim whatever to the character of historical facts and are wholly invalid as evidence of any revelation.”

— John Stuart Mill

280. “Geometry is a Deductive Science.”

— John Stuart Mill

281. “All free communities have both been more exempt from social injustice and crime, and have attained more brilliant prosperity, than any others, or than they themselves after they have lost their freedom.”

— John Stuart Mill

282. “That a thing is peculiar; is no argument for its being blamable; since the most criminal actions are to a being like man not more unnatural than most of the virtues.”

— John Stuart Mill

283. “Again, defenders of utility often find themselves called upon to reply to such objections as this – that there is not time, previous to action, for calculating and weighing the effects of any line of conduct on the general happiness. This is exactly as if any one were to say that it is impossible to guide our conduct by Christianity, because there is not time, on every occasion on which anything has to be done, to read through the Old and New Testaments.”

— John Stuart Mill

284. “A being who can create a race of men devoid of real freedom and inevitably foredoomed to be sinners, and then punish them for being what he has made them, may be omnipotent and various other things, but he is not what the English language has always intended by the adjective holy.”

— John Stuart Mill

285. “How will the remaining portion of the community like to have the amusements that shall be permitted to them regulated by the religious and moral sentiments of the stricter Calvinists and Methodists? Would they not, with considerable peremptoriness, desire these intrusively pious members of society to mind their own business? This is precisely what should be said to every government and every public, who have the pretension that no person shall enjoy any pleasure which they think wrong.”

— John Stuart Mill

286. “Each undervalues that part of the materials of thought with which he is not familiar.”

— John Stuart Mill

287. “Then are seen the cases, so frequent in this age of the world as almost to form the majority, in which the creed remains as it were outside the mind, incrusting and petrifying it again all other influences addressed to the higher parts of our nature; manifesting its power by not suffering any fresh and living conviction to get in, but itself doing nothing for the mind or heart except standing sentinel over them to keep them vacant.”

— John Stuart Mill

288. “The fifth leading division of names is into relative and absolute, or let us rather say, relative and non-relative; for the word absolute is put upon much too hard duty in metaphysics, not to be willingly spared when its services can be dispensed with.”

— John Stuart Mill

289. “All political revolutions, not affected by foreign conquest, originate in moral revolutions. The subversion of established institutions is merely one consequence of the previous subversion of established opinions.”

— John Stuart Mill

290. “It may almost always be said both of sects and of individuals, who derive their morality from religion, that the better logicians they are, the worse moralists.”

— John Stuart Mill

291. “The only power deserving the name is that of masses, and of governments while they make themselves the organ of the tendencies and instincts of masses.”

— John Stuart Mill

292. “Command and obedience are but unfortunate necessities of human life: society in equality is its normal state.”

— John Stuart Mill

293. “A world from which solitude is extirpated, is a very poor ideal.”

— John Stuart Mill

294. “A few individuals, by extraordinary genius, or by the accidental acquisition of a good set of intellectual habits, may work without principles in the same way, or nearly the same way, in which they would have worked if they had been in possession of principles. But the bulk of mankind require either to understand the theory of what they are doing, or to have rules laid down for them by those who have understood the theory.”

— John Stuart Mill

295. “He who cannot by his labor suffice for his own support has no claim to the privilege of helping himself to the money of others. By becoming dependent on the remaining members of the community for actual subsistence, he abdicates his claim to equal rights for them I other respects.”

— John Stuart Mill

296. “If I have accomplished anything, I owe it, among other fortunate circumstances, to the fact that through the early training bestowed on me by my father, I started, I may fairly say, with an advantage of a quarter of a century over my contemporaries.”

— John Stuart Mill

297. “It may be objected that the meaning of names can guide us at most only to the opinions, possibly the foolish and groundless opinions, which mankind have formed concerning things, and that as the object of philosophy is truth, not opinion, the philosopher should dismiss words and look into things themselves, to ascertain what questions can be asked and answered in regard to them.”

— John Stuart Mill

298. “It would not be easy even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete, than to endeavor so to live that Christ would approve our life.”

— John Stuart Mill

299. “The will of the people, moreover, practically means the will of the most numerous or the most active part of the people; the majority, or those who succeed in making themselves accepted as the majority; type people, consequently, may desire to oppress a part of their number; and precautions are as much needed against this as against any other abuse of power.”

— John Stuart Mill

300. “Trade is a social act.”

— John Stuart Mill