Top 300 John Stuart Mill Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “Trade is a social act.”

— John Stuart Mill

302. “Experience has taught me that those who give their time to the absorbing claims of what is called society, not having leisure to keep up a large acquaintance with the organs of opinion, remain much more ignorant of the general state either of the public mind, or of the active and instructed part of it, than a recluse who reads the newspapers need be.”

— John Stuart Mill

303. “In many cases, though individuals may not do the particular thing so well, on the average, as the officers of government, it is nevertheless desirable that it should be done by them, rather than by the government, as a means to their own mental education – a mode of strengthening their active faculties, exercising their judgment, and giving them a familiar knowledge of the subjects with which they are thus left to deal.”

— John Stuart Mill

304. “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, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body.”

— John Stuart Mill

305. “Such is the facility with which mankind believe at one and the same time things inconsistent with one another, and so few are those who draw from what they receive as truths, any consequences but those recommended to them by their feelings, that multitudes have held the undoubting belief in an Omnipotent Author of Hell, and have nevertheless identified that being with the one best conception they were able to form of perfect goodness.”

— John Stuart Mill

306. “The demand for commodities is not the demand for labor.”

— John Stuart Mill

307. “A government with all this mass of favours to give or to withhold, however free in name, wields a power of bribery scarcely surpassed by an avowed autocracy, rendering it master of the elections in almost any circumstances but those of rare and extraordinary public excitement.”

— John Stuart Mill

308. “The intensest feeling of the beauty of a cloud lighted by the setting sun, is no hindrance to my knowing that the cloud is a vapour of water, subject to all the laws of vapours in a state of suspension; and I am just as likely to allow for, and act on, these physical laws whenever there is occasion to do so, as if I had been incapable of perceiving any distinction between beauty and ugliness.”

— John Stuart Mill

309. “Examples of truths known to us by immediate consciousness, are our own bodily sensations and mental feelings. I know directly, and of my own knowledge, that I was vexed yesterday, or that I am hungry to-day.”

— John Stuart Mill

310. “Truths are known to us in two ways: some are known directly, and of themselves; some through the medium of other truths. The former are the subject of Intuition, or Consciousness; 4 the latter, of Inference.”

— John Stuart Mill

311. “The despotism of custom is on the wane. We are not content to know that things are; we ask whether they ought to be.”

— John Stuart Mill

312. “Books destined to form future thinkers take too much time to write, and when written come, in general, too slowly into notice and repute, to be relied on for subsistence.”

— John Stuart Mill

313. “The fourth principal division of names, is into positive and negative. Positive, as man, tree, good; negative, as not-man, not-tree, not-good. To every positive concrete name, a corresponding negative one might be framed.”

— John Stuart Mill

314. “In general, opinions contrary to those commonly received can only obtain a hearing by studied moderation of language, and the most cautious avoidance of unnecessary offence, from which they hardly ever deviate even in a slight degree without losing ground: while unmeasured vituperation employed on the side of the prevailing opinion, really does deter people from professing contrary opinions, and from listening to those who profess them.”

— John Stuart Mill

315. “I had learnt from experience that many false opinions may be exchanged for true ones, without in the least altering the habits of mind of which false opinions are made.”

— John Stuart Mill

316. “In England, from the peculiar circumstances of our political history, though the yoke of opinion is perhaps heavier, that of law is lighter, than in most other countries of Europe; and there is considerable jealousy of direct interference, by the legislative or the executive power, with private conduct; not so much from any just regard for the independence of the individual, as from the still subsisting habit of looking on the government as representing an opposite interest to the public.”

— John Stuart Mill

317. “The author has endeavored to combat their theory in the manner in which Diogenes confuted the skeptical reasonings against the possibility of motion; remembering that Diogenes’s argument would have been equally conclusive, though his individual perambulations might not have extended beyond the circuit of his own tub.”

— John Stuart Mill

318. “Feelings are of four sorts: Sensations, Thoughts, Emotions, and Volitions. What are called Perceptions are merely a particular case of Belief, and Belief is a kind of thought. Actions are merely volitions followed by an effect.”

— John Stuart Mill

319. “People think genius a fine thing if it enables a man to write an exciting poem, or paint a picture. But in its true sense, that of originality in thought and action, though no one says that it is not a thing to be admired, nearly all, at heart, think that they can do very well without it.”

— John Stuart Mill

320. “Popular opinions, on subjects not palpable to sense, are often true, but seldom or never the whole truth.”

— John Stuart Mill

321. “Since there is no difference of meaning between round, and a round object, it is only custom which prescribes that on any given occasion one shall be used, and not the other. We shall, therefore, without scruple, speak of adjectives as names, whether in their own right, or as representative of the more circuitous forms of expression above exemplified.”

— John Stuart Mill

322. “To what a degree this loose mode of classing and denominating objects has rendered the vocabulary of mental and moral philosophy unfit for the purposes of accurate thinking, is best known to whoever has most meditated on the present condition of those branches of knowledge.”

— John Stuart Mill

323. “He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice. He gains no practice either in discerning or in desiring what is best. The mental and moral, like the muscular powers, are improved only by being used. The faculties are called into no exercise by doing a thing merely because others do it, no more than by believing a thing only because others believe it.”

— John Stuart Mill

324. “Who doubts that there may be great goodness, and great happiness, and great affection under the absolute government of a good man? Meanwhile, laws and institutions require to be adapted, not to good men, but to bad.”

— John Stuart Mill

325. “It is what men think, that determines how they act.”

— John Stuart Mill

326. “There is no greater assumption of infallibility in forbidding the propagation of error, than in any other thing which is done by public authority on its own judgment and responsibility.”

— John Stuart Mill

327. “Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them.”

— John Stuart Mill

328. “Having said that Individuality is the same thing with development, and that it is only the cultivation of individuality which produces, or can produce, well-developed human beings, I might here close the argument: for what more or better can be said of any condition of human affairs, than that it brings human beings themselves nearer to the best thing they can be?”

— John Stuart Mill

329. “There is not the same willingness to admit that our desires and should be our own likewise, or that to possess impulses of our own, and of any strength, is anything but a peril and a snare. Yet desires and impulses are as much a part of a perfect human being as beliefs and restraints; and strong impulses are only perilous when not properly balanced.”

— John Stuart Mill

330. “The same strong susceptibilities which makes the personal impulses vivid and powerful are also the source from whence are generated the most passionate love of virtue and the sternest self-control.”

— John Stuart Mill