Mill Quotes & Sayings

Central to Mill's approach throughout On Liberty is his 'Harm Principle', the idea that individual adults should be free to do whatever they wish up to the point where they harm another person in the process. Mill's principle is apparently straightforward: the only justification for interference with someone's freedom to live their life as they choose is if they risk harming other people. — Nigel Warburton

Our large trading cities bear to me very nearly the aspect of monastic establishments in which the roar of the mill-wheel and the crane takes the place of other devotional music, and in which the worship of Mammon and Moloch is conducted with a tender reverence and an exact propriety; the merchant rising to his Mammon matins, with the self-denial of an anchorite, and expiating the frivolities into which he maybe beguiled in the course of the day by late attendance at Mammon vespers. — John Ruskin

With the money my mother earned from selling cakes, my father cut a deal with Mangochi and bought one pail of maize. My mother took it to the mill, saved half the flour for us, and used the rest for more cakes. We did this every day, taking enough to eat and selling the rest. It was enough to provide our one blob of nsima each night, along with some pumpkin leaves. It was practically nothing, yet knowing it would be there somehow made the hunger less painful.
"As long as we can stay in business," my father said, "we'll make it through. Our profit is that we live. — William Kamkwamba

Accordingly, France Had Voltaire, and his school of negative thinkers, and England (or rather Scotland) had the profoundest negative thinker on record, David Hume: a man, the peculiarities of whose mind qualified him to detect failure of proof, and want of logical consistency, at a depth which French skeptics, with their comparatively feeble powers of analysis and abstractions stop far short of, and which German subtlety alone could thoroughly appreciate, or hope to rival. — John Stuart Mill

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

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

Proposed Roads to Freedom
In this book Russell weighs the respective advantages and disadvantages of Socialism, Marxism and Syndicalism. — John Stuart Mill

Let your rest be perfect in its season, like the rest of waters that are still. If you will have a model or your living, take neither the stars, for they fly without ceasing, nor the ocean that ebbs and flows, nor the river that cannot stay, but rather let your life be like that of the summer air, which has times of noble energy and times of perfect peace. It fills the sails of ships upon the sea, and the miller thanks it on the breezy uplands; it works generously for the health and wealth of all men, yet it claims it hours of rest.. I have pushed the fleet, I have turned the mill, I have refreshed the city, and now though the captain may walk impatiently on the quarter-deck, and the miller swear, and the city stink, I will stir no more until it pleases me. — Philip Gilbert Hamerton

The mine owners did not find the gold, they did not mine the gold, they did not mill the gold, but by some weird alchemy all the gold belonged to them! — Bill Haywood

I consider it presumption in anyone to pretend to decide what women are or are not, can or cannot be, by natural constitution. They have always hitherto been kept, as far as regards spontaneous development, in so unnatural a state, that their nature cannot but have been greatly distorted and disguised; and no one can safely pronounce that if women's nature were left to choose its direction as freely as men's, and if no artificial bent were attempted to be given to it except that required by the conditions of human society, and given to both sexes alike, there would be any material difference, or perhaps any difference at all, in the character and capacities which would unfold themselves. — John Stuart Mill

To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility; it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. Oh vast gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death! Why was the living banished thither companionless, conscious? Why, if there is no Devil; nay, unless the Devil is your God? — Thomas Carlyle

Fella can get so he misses the noise of a saw mill. — John Steinbeck

The golf links lie so near the mill, That almost every day, The laboring children can look out, And watch the men at play — Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn

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

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

Command and obedience are but unfortunate necessities of human life: society in equality is its normal state. — John Stuart Mill

The successful conduct of an industrial enterprise requires two quite distinct qualifications: fidelity and zeal. — John Stuart Mill

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

I believe in spectacles, but I think eyes necessary too. — John Stuart Mill

The cause, then, philosophically speaking, is the sum total of the conditions, positive and negative, taken together; the whole of the contingencies of every description, which being realized, the consequent invariably follows. — John Stuart Mill

Even in ordinary conversation, the ideas connected with the word Logic include at least precision of language, and accuracy of classification: and we perhaps oftener hear persons speak of a logical arrangement, or of expressions logically defined, than of conclusions logically deduced from premises. — John Stuart Mill

There is an imaginary circle drawn around every human being, over which no government should be able to step. — John Stuart Mill

You think you know what is just and what is not. I understand. We all think we know." I had no doubt, myself, then, that at each moment each one of us, man, woman, child, perhaps even the poor old horse turning the mill-wheel, knew what was just: all creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice. "But we live in a world of laws," I said to my poor prisoner, "a world of the second-best. There is nothing we can do about that. We are fallen creatures. All we can do is to uphold the laws, all of us, without allowing the memory of justice to fade. — J.M. Coetzee

The feeling of a direct responsibility of the individual to God is almost wholly a creation of Protestantism. — John Stuart Mill

The gossip mill on tour is always turning. I have to be a little careful about what I tell guys who I don't consider close friends, because even though they might not spread it to other players, they'll usually tell their wives. And once the wives get it, it's gone. — Boo Weekley

I don't rely on catchphrases or really like sing-along. I just do whatever I feel. Whatever the beat makes me say, I do that and I run with that. It's been working for me, so I'd be cool with that. — Meek Mill

The assumption that we are infallible can we justify the suppression of opinions we think false. Ages are as fallible as individuals, every age having held many opinions which subsequent ages have deemed not only false but absurd. — John Stuart Mill

Abandoned mill that — Craig Johnson

A profound conviction raises a man above the feeling of ridicule. — John Stuart Mill

Men do not desire to be rich, but to be richer than other men. — John Stuart Mill

A person's taste is as much his own peculiar concern as his opinion or his purse. — John Stuart Mill

He stayed on the balcony for a while, the throbbing energy of the chawls filling his veins as he watched traffic ebb and flow. Shutters veiled the shops on the ground floor across the lane, and only a few lights flickered here and there, probably other mill workers like his father.
(from Aam Papad) — Ken Doyle

Auguste Comte, in particular, whose social system, as unfolded in his Systeme de Politique Positive, aims at establishing (though by moral more than by legal appliances) a despotism of society over the individual, surpassing anything contemplated in the political ideal of the most rigid disciplinarian among the ancient philosophers. — John Stuart Mill

All good things which exist are the fruits of originality. — John Stuart Mill

Is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity. — John Stuart Mill

The dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of the pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes. — John Stuart Mill

It may be asked, how come we to ascribe our sensations to any external cause? And is there sufficient ground for so ascribing them? It is known, that there are metaphysicians who have raised a controversy on the point; maintaining that we are not warranted in referring our sensations to a cause such as we understand by the word Body, or to any external cause whatever. — John Stuart Mill

What's the Matter with the Mill? — Memphis Minnie

There was not a lot of room for someone like me, who kept the gossip mill running like a hamster wheel. — Molly Harper

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

The distinction, therefore, between general names, and individual or singular names, is fundamental; and may be considered as the first grand division of names. — John Stuart Mill

So the conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it
perhaps as much more as the roots are more vital than grafts. It is good that new ideas should be heard, for the sake of the few that can be used; but it is also good that new ideas should be compelled to go through the mill of objection, opposition, and contumely; this is the trial heat which innovations must survive before being allowed to enter the human race. It is good that the old should resist the young, and that the young should prod the old; out of this tension, as out of the strife of the sexes and the classes, comes a creative tensile strength, a stimulated development, a secret and basic unity and movement of the whole. — Will Durant

Although, however, Hobbes's theory of Predication, according to the well-known remark of Leibnitz, and the avowal of Hobbes himself, 32 renders truth and falsity completely arbitrary, with no standard but the will of men, it must not be concluded that either Hobbes, or any of the other thinkers who have in the main agreed with him, did in fact consider the distinction between truth and error as less real, or attached less importance to it, than other people. — John Stuart Mill

A Paper Town is a town that's got a paper mill on it. — John Green

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

I protest against deference to any man, whether John Stuart Mill, or Adam Smith, or Aristotle, being allowed to check inquiry. Our science has become far too much a stagnant one, in which opinions rather than experience and reason are appealed to. — William Stanley Jevons

I used a lot of what we call the "Shred-mill." It's like a treadmill, but you're basically running up hill and it's getting faster as you go. It definitely helped at the combine because it teaches you drive phases, how to pump your arms and how to use different aspects of your body. — Calvin Pryor

Few human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast's pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base, even though they should be persuaded that the fool, the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs. — John Stuart Mill

I worked in a steel mill, I worked in a foundry, I worked in a paper mill, I worked in a chemical refinery, construction, I did all that. It was great work, it was good. I learned welding, mechanic, carpentry, but it saved me from going back to prison because that's helpful. It's really sad because those jobs are gone. — Luis J. Rodriguez

To tax the larger incomes at a higher percentage than the smaller, is to lay a tax on industry and economy; to impose a penalty on people for having worked harder and saved more than their neighbors. — John Stuart Mill

Nigerians don't buy houses because they're old. A renovated two-hundred-year-old mill granary, you know, the kind of thing Europeans like. It doesn't work here at all. But of course it makes sense because we are Third Worlders and Third Worlders are forward-looking, we like things to be new, because our best is still ahead, while in the West their best is already past and so they have to make a fetish of that past. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

It appears, then, to be a condition of a genuinely scientific hypothesis, that it be not destined always to remain an hypothesis, but be certain to be either proved or disproved by..comparison with observed facts. — John Stuart Mill

At first, I didn't hang out with celebrity kids. That wasn't the way I was brought up. I went to a run-of-the-mill Catholic primary school when we first moved to L.A. But then I went to a high school where there were lots of 'industry' children. Those weren't my best friends and I've never set out to make myself a part of that scene. — Lily Collins

"Have you done your homework?" my mother would ask. "I'll do it later." "You will do it now, young man. I don't want you winding up on the third shift at Flagg-Utica." Flagg-Utica was a local textile plant. Somehow, I never could figure how failing to read three chapters in my geography book about the various sorts of vegetation to be found in a tropical rain forest had anything to do with facing a life as a mill hand. But with enough guilt and fear as catalysts, you can read anything, even geography books and Deuteronomy. — Lewis Grizzard

POSITIVISM- A philosophy that denies our knowledge of the Real and affirms our ignorance of the Apparent. Its longest exponent is Comte, its broadest Mill and its thickest Spencer. — Ambrose Bierce

We've gone through some kind of a metamorphosis over the years. We've made food very easy to get calories from." He talked about the greater degree to which we refine foods now; an example is how we mill away the bran from brown rice and whole wheat flour. As a result the food is "light, it's white, it's very easy to swallow. It doesn't obstruct you in any way. It's easy to get a lot of calories without a lot of chewing."
Because this kind of food disappears down our throats so quickly after the first bite, it readily overrides the body's signals that should tell us "I'm full. — David A. Kessler

But these few are the salt of the earth; without them, human life would become a stagnant pool. Not only is it they who introduce good things which did not before exist, it is they who keep the life in those which already existed. — John Stuart Mill

The object of universities is not to make skillful lawyers, physicians or engineers. It is to make capable and cultivated human beings — John Stuart Mill

My mother was an English teacher who decided to become a math teacher, and she used me as a guinea pig at home. My father had been a math teacher and then went to work at a steel mill because, frankly, he could make more money doing that. — Freeman A. Hrabowski III

Every in group distinguishes itself from the outgroup by some process of "going through the mill" or enduring sufferings which are subsequently worn as the proud badge of graduation — Alan W. Watts

The disparity between a restaurant's price and food quality rises in direct proportion to the size of the pepper mill. — Bryan Q. Miller

No one can be a great thinker who does not recognize that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead. — John Stuart Mill

The employment of the word Logic to denote the theory of Argumentation, is derived from the Aristotelian, or, as they are commonly termed, the scholastic, logicians. — John Stuart Mill

My hometown is 30,000 people. It's remote, but it's an oil town, so it's developed. There's definitely a mill mentality: not a lot of people leave. It's a lot of long hours, shift work. Even my Dad, who's a dentist worked hard, because that's what people do up there. — Aaron Lines

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

I know tolerably well what Ireland was, but have a very imperfect idea of what Ireland is. — John Stuart Mill

He would now have comprehended that work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that play consists of whaterver a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why construcing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill, is work, whilst rolling nine-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service that would turn it into work, then they would resign. — Mark Twain

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

Ask yourself if you are happy and you cease to be so." That was John Stuart Mill, the nineteenth-century British philosopher who believed that happiness should be approached sideways, "like a crab." Is Bhutan a nation of crabs? Or is this whole notion of Gross National Happiness just a clever marketing ploy, like the one Aruba dreamed up a few years ago. "Come to Aruba: the island where happiness lives. — Eric Weiner

The prevailing tendency to regard all the marked distinctions of human character as innate, and in the main indelible, and to ignore the irresistible proofs that by far the greater part of those differences, whether between individuals, races, or sexes are such as not only might but naturally would be produced by differences in circumstances, is one of the chief hinderances to the rational treatment of great social questions, and one of the greatest stumbling blocks to human improvement. — John Stuart Mill

In this age, the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. 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. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time. — John Stuart Mill

When a thing is bought not for its use but for its costliness, cheapness is no recommendation. As Sismondi remarks, the consequence of cheapening articles of vanity, is not that less is expended on such things, but that the buyers substitute for the cheapened article some other which is more costly, or a more elaborate quality of the same thing; and as the inferior quality answered the purpose of vanity equally well when it was equally expensive, a tax on the article is really paid by nobody: it is a creation of public revenue by which nobody loses. — John Stuart Mill

Desperately Lonely Swing Set Needs Loving Home
"One swing set, well worn but structually sound, seeks new home. Make memories with your kid or kids so that someday he or she or they will look into the backyard and feel the ache of sentimentality as desperately as I did this afternoon. It's all fragile and fleeting, dear reader, but with this swing set, your child(ren) will be introduced to the ups and downs of human life gently and safely, and may alos learn the most important lesson of all: No matter how hard how you kick, no matter how high you get, you can't go all the way around."
Swing set currently resides near 83rd and Spring Mill. — John Green

To vest a few fallible men - prosecutors, judges, jurors - with vast powers of literary or artistic censorship, to convert them into what J.S. Mill called the "moral police" is to make them despotic arbiters of literary products ... If one day they ban mediocre books as obscene, another day they may do otherwise to a work of a genius. Originality, not too plentiful, should be cherished, not stifled. An author's imagination may be cramped if he must write with an eye on prosecutors or juries ... — Jerome Frank

Few and fewer pigeons visit us every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the grove in our minds is laid waste
sold to feed unnecessary fires of ambition, or sent to mill
and there is scarcely a twig left for them to perch on. — Henry David Thoreau

Burnout is grist to the mill. I write every day, for most of the day, so it's just about turning into metaphor whatever's going on in my life, in the world, and in my head. Every nightmare, every moment of grief or joy or failure, is a moment I can convert into cash via words. — Grant Morrison

That so few dare be eccentric marks the chief danger of our time. — John Stuart Mill

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

I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than in attempting to satisfy them. — John Stuart Mill

A state which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes
will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished. — John Stuart Mill

The besetting danger is not so much of embracing falsehood for truth, as of mistaking a part of the truth for the whole. — John Stuart Mill

Well, let's all get maudlin, shall we? George, stop on the way and get us some red-hot pokers to put out our eyes. Oh, and while you're at it, I think we should see about adding salt for our wounds, too. (Solin)
Quite good, sir. Is there any particular place you'd care for me to stop? I've heard the market is a good place for pokers. That is, if you're agreeable to a short detour. (George)
What do you two think? Run-of-the-mill pokers, or a better quality. Oh hell, why not use rusty spoons. They'd hurt more. (Solin) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

You pay a price for the 'gift' of an active imagination. While mine played a major part in making me a writer, it also made me adept at transforming run-of-the-mill molehills into towering mountain ranges. — Jean Little

I don't know what type of music my son will want. By the time he starts listening to music, really, at like, 15, 16, I'll probably have 10 albums out by that time. — Meek Mill

A colleague once described political theorists as people who were obsessed with two dozen books; after half a century of grappling with Mill's essay On Liberty, or Hobbes's Leviathan, I have sometimes thought two dozen might be a little on the high side. — Alan Ryan

A ghost mill, they called it, infested with all sorts of witches, phantoms, and monsters. It was as though the very timbers of the mill had soaked up the unearthly forces that seethed and thronged in the valley, like the wood of a wine barrel takes up the stain and scent of the wine. — Helen Grant

Every great movement must experience three stages: ridicule, discussion, adoption. — John Stuart Mill

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

A great statesman is he who knows when to depart from traditions, as well as when to adhere to them. — John Stuart Mill

The wonderful thing about being a writer is that everything that happens is grist to the mill. — Jane Green

Of all difficulties which impede the progress of thought, and the formation of well-grounded opinions on life and social arrangements, the greatest is now the unspeakable ignorance and inattention of mankind in respect to the influences which form human character. — John Stuart Mill

I don't wear the see-through shirts or anything too glittery. I come from that '90s school of rap. Fitted caps, because I got a big head, so snapbacks don't fit me right. — Meek Mill

Natural rights, nonsense; natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense, elevated nonsense, nonsense going on stilts. — John Stuart Mill

I love the smell of old books, Mandy sighed, inhaling deeply with the book pressed against her face. The yellow pages smelled of wood and paper mills and mothballs. — Rebecca McNutt

Liberty lies in the rights of that person whose views you find most odious. — John Stuart Mill

And when the balled
Pulp of your heart
Confronts its small
Mill of silence
How you jump - — Sylvia Plath

Mr. J.S. Mill speaks, in his celebrated work, "Utilitarianism," of the social feelings as a "powerful natural sentiment," and as "the natural basis of sentiment for utilitarian morality," but on the previous page he says, "if, as is my own belief, the moral feelings are not innate, but acquired, they are not for that reason less natural." It is with hesitation that I venture to differ from so profound a thinker, but it can hardly be disputed that the social feelings are instinctive or innate in the lower animals; and why should they not be so in man? — Charles Darwin

The sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable, is that people do actually desire it. — John Stuart Mill

The love of power and the love of liberty are in eternal antagonism. — John Stuart Mill

It has been stated that the Wigan District of Lancashire, and the surrounding areas had three females for every male in the population right up to the turn of the twentieth century. Fine for the boys you might think, but this was a direct result of the men folk being wiped out in mining accidents, whether they were such as this, an explosion, or the multitude of individual accidents that took away life in the coal mines of the district. The Saw Mill Pit, with its dark and deathly past was finally abandoned in 1898. (24) — Jack Nadin