John Stuart Mill Utilitarianism Quotes & Sayings

The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest-Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure. — John Stuart Mill

These [the armed forces] are not our reliance against a resumption of tyranny in our fair land. All of them may be turned against our liberties, without making us stronger or weaker for the struggle. Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in our bosoms. Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, every where ... Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage, and you are preparing your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of those around you, you have lost the genius of your own independence, and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises. — Abraham Lincoln

He sure put things into words good. — S.E. Hinton

Pornography is supposed to arouse sexual desires. If pornography is a crime, when will they arrest makers of perfume? — Richard Fleischer

The freedom to connect to the world anywhere at anytime brings with it the threat of unscrupulous predators and criminals who mask their activities with the anonymity the Internet provides to its users. — Mike Fitzpatrick

To fare on - fusing the self that wakes and the self that dreams. — Nancy Horan

In a world in which there is so much to interest, so much to enjoy, and so much also to correct and improve, everyone who has this moderate amount of moral and intellectual requisites is capable of an existence which may be called enviable; and unless such a person, through bad laws, or subjection to the will of others, is denied the liberty to use the sources of happiness within his reach, he will not fail to find the enviable existence — John Stuart Mill

Love makes the soul glow. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Hope can be the cruelest thing. But it was all she had. — Robert Dunbar

Her soul was a country he longed to explore and know as well as he did every stone that pocked that creek path. — Lori Benton

All social inequalities which have ceased to be considered expedient, assume the character not of simple inexpediency, but of injustice, and appear so tyrannical, that people are apt to wonder how they ever could have been tolerated; forgetful that they themselves perhaps tolerate other inequalities under an equally mistaken notion of expediency, the correction of which would make that which they approve seem quite as monstrous as what they have at last learnt to condemn. The entire history of social improvement has been a series of transitions, by which one custom or institution after another, from being a supposed primary necessity of social existence, has passed into the rank of a universally stigmatised injustice and tyranny. So it has been with the distinctions of slaves and freemen, nobles and serfs, patricians and plebeians; and so it will be, and in part already is, with the aristocracies of colour, race, and sex. — John Stuart Mill

It results from the preceding considerations, that there is in reality nothing desired except happiness. Whatever is desired otherwise than as a means to some end beyond itself, and ultimately to happiness, is desired as itself a part of happiness, and is not desired for itself until it has become so. Those who desire virtue for its own sake, desire it either because the consciousness of it is a pleasure, or because the consciousness of being without it is a pain, or for both reasons united; as in truth the pleasure and pain seldom exist separately, but almost always together, the same person feeling pleasure in the degree of virtue attained, and pain in not having attained more. If one of these gave him no pleasure, and the other no pain, he would not love or desire virtue, or would desire it only for the other benefits which it might produce to himself or to persons whom he cared for. — John Stuart Mill

Even if Lady Macbeth could have removed that damn spot, wouldn't her hands have been red from all of the scrubbing? — Jonathan Safran Foer

I feel I've always been writing about self-identity. How do we become who we are? So I'm just writing from experience what's concerned me. — Amy Tan

We learned that you can only feel one thing at one time," says Isolde. "You can feel excitement or you can feel fear but you can never feel both. We learned why beauty is so important: beauty is important because you can't really defile something that is already ugly, and to defile is the ultimate goal of the sexual impulse. We learned that you can always say no. — Eleanor Catton

You're killing me here! You are far more dangerous than I am! — Amanda Hocking