John Stuart Mill Quotes
A person's taste is as much his own peculiar concern as his opinion or his purse.
John Stuart Mill
Quotes to Explore
-
It is better to be a human dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.
John Stuart Mill
-
Liberty consists in doing what one desires.
John Stuart Mill
-
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
-
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
-
When one's ideas are not challenged, one's ability to defend them weakens.
John Stuart Mill
-
I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than in attempting to satisfy them.
John Stuart Mill
-
As there were black swans, though civilized people had existed for three thousand years on the earth without meeting with them...The uniform experience, therefore, of the inhabitants of the known world, agreeing in a common result, without one known instance of deviation from that result, is not always sufficient to establish a general conclusion.
John Stuart Mill
-
Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.
John Stuart Mill
-
A bureaucracy always tends to become a pedantocracy.
John Stuart Mill
-
A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.
John Stuart Mill
-
I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally Conservative. I believe that to be so obvious and undeniable a fact that I hardly think any hon. Gentleman will question 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
-
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
-
Every established fact which is too bad to admit of any other defence is always presented to us as an injunction of religion.
John Stuart Mill
-
Of two pleasures, if there be one which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure.
John Stuart Mill
-
There is always need of persons not only to discover new truths, and point out when what were once truths are true no longer, but also to commence new practices, and set the example of more enlightened conduct, and better taste and sense in human life.
John Stuart Mill
-
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their own free choice - is often the means of their regeneration.
John Stuart Mill
-
There is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides.
John Stuart Mill
