Stuart Mill Quotes & Sayings

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

My father never permitted anything which I learnt to degenerate into a mere exercise of memory. He strove to make the understanding not only go along with every step of the teaching but ... precede it. — John Stuart Mill

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

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

Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their sentiments. — John Stuart Mill

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

The laws and conditions of the production of wealth partake of the character of physical truths. There is nothing optional or arbitrary in them ... It is not so with the Distribution of Wealth. That is a matter of human institution solely. The things once there, mankind, individually or collectively, can do with them as they like. — 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

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

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

Besides the propositions which assert Sequence or Co-existence, there are some which assert simple Existence; 36 and others assert Causation, which, subject to the explanations [pg 083] which will follow in the Third Book, must be considered provisionally as a distinct and peculiar kind of assertion. — John Stuart Mill

We know how easily the uselessness of almost every branch of knowledge may be proved to the complete satisfaction of those who do not possess it. — John Stuart Mill

What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing - the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others. — John Stuart Mill

Strange it is that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free speech but object to their being "pushed to an extreme", not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case. — John Stuart Mill

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

Truth emerges from the clash of adverse ideas. — John Stuart Mill

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

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

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

If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger, but not a happier or a better population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it. — John Stuart Mill

The process of tracing regularity in any complicated, and at first sight confused, set of appearances, is necessarily tentative; we begin by making any supposition, even a false one, to see what consequences will follow from it ; and by observing how these differ from the real phenomena, we learn what corrections to make in our assumption. — 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

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 world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments, of those distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue, are complete sceptics in religion. — 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

He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion ... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them ... he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form. — John Stuart Mill

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

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

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

The average condition of the people improving or deteriorating, depends upon whether population is advancing faster than improvement, or improvement than population. — John Stuart Mill

There is a very real evil consequent on ascribing supernatural origin to the received maxilms of morality. That origin consecrates the whole of them and protects them from being discussed or criticized. — John Stuart Mill

The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice. — 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

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

Human envy is certainly not one of the sources of discontent that a free society can eliminate. It is probably one of the essential conditions for the preservation of such a society that we do not countenance envy, not sanction its demands by camouflaging it as social justice, but treat it, in the words of John Stuart Mill, as 'the most anti-social and evil of all passions.' — Friedrich August Von Hayek

To do as one would be done by, and to love one's neighbour as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality — John Stuart Mill

Geometry is a Deductive Science. — John Stuart Mill

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

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

All errors which a man is likely to commit against advice are far outweighed by the evil of allowing others to constrain him for his good. — John Stuart Mill

To bring a child into existence without a fair prospect of being able, not only to provide food for its body, but instruction and training for its mind is a moral crime, both against the unfortunate offspring and against society — John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill, "nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another, are nature's every day performances."104 — John Zande

The demand for commodities is not the demand for labor. — John Stuart Mill

Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of the representative government, cannot exist. — John Stuart Mill

To think that because those who wield power in society wield in the end that of government, therefore it is of no use to attempt to influence the constitution of the government by acting on opinion, is to forget that opinion is itself one of the greatest active social forces. One person with a belief is a social power equal to ninety-nine who have only interests. — John Stuart Mill

What is really inspiriting and ennobling in the doctrine of freewill, is the conviction that we have real power over the formation of our own character; that our will, by influencing some of our circumstances, can modify our future habits or capabilities of willing. — John Stuart Mill

There is nothing which an untrained mind shows itself more hopelessly incapable, than in drawing the proper general conclusions from its own experience. And even trained minds, when all their training is on a special subject, and does not extend to the general principles of induction, are only kept right when there are ready opportunities of verifying their inferences by facts. — John Stuart Mill

It often happens that the universal belief of one age, a belief from which no one was free or could be free without an extraordinary effort of genius or courage, becomes to a subsequent age, so palpable an absurdity, that the only difficulty is to imagine how such an idea could ever have appeared credible. — John Stuart Mill

Even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds — John Stuart Mill

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

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 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

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

To see the futurity of the species has always been the privilege of the intellectual elite, or of those who have learnt from them; to have the feelings of that futurity has been the distinction, and usually the martyrdom, of a still rare elite. Institutions, books, education, society, all go on training human beings for the old, long after the new has come; much more when it is only coming. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any society which is not improving is deteriorating, and the more so the closer and more familiar it is. Even a really superior man almost always begins to deteriorate when he is habitually king of his company. — John Stuart Mill

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

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

The United States is no more a Christian nation because most of its citizens are Christians than it is a 'white' nation because most of its citizens are white. We are Americans because we practice democracy and believe in republican government, not because we practice revealed religion and believe in Bible-based government. — John Stuart Mill

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

Since reasoning , or inference, the principal subject of logic, is an operation which usually takes place by means of words , and in complicated cases can take place in no other way: those who have not a thorough insight into both the signification and purpose of words, will be under chances, amounting almost to certainty, of reasoning or inferring incorrectly. — John Stuart Mill

The second general division of names is into concrete and abstract. A concrete name is a name which stands for a thing; an abstract name is a name which stands for an attribute of a thing. — John Stuart Mill

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

Art is the employent of the powers of nature for an end. — John Stuart Mill

Eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard ... All poetry is of the nature of the soliloquy. — John Stuart Mill

All action is for the sake of some end; and rules of action, it seems natural to suppose, must take their whole character and color from the end to which they are subservient. — 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

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

We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and even if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still. — John Stuart Mill

I will call no being good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures; and if such a creature can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go . — John Stuart Mill