John Stuart Mill Quotes
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Whatever we may think or affect to think of the present age, we cannot get out of it; we must suffer with its sufferings, and enjoy with its enjoyments; we must share in its lot, and, to be either useful or at ease, we must even partake its character.
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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.
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There is a tolerably general agreement about what a university is not. It is not a place of professional education.
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If it were only that people have diversities of taste, that is reason enough for not attempting to shape them all after one model. But different persons also require different conditions for their spiritual development, and can no more exist healthily in the same moral, than all the varieties of plants can in the same physical, atmosphere and climate.
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To mistake money for wealth, is the same sort of error as to mistake the highway which may be the easiest way of getting to your house or lands, for the house and lands themselves.
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Since the state must necessarily provide subsistence for the criminal poor while undergoing punishment, not to do the same for the poor who have not offended is to give a premium on crime.
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If I had loved any one sufficiently to make confiding my griefs a necessity, I should not have been in the condition.
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It is a bitter thought, how different a thing the Christianity of the world might have been, if the Christian faith had been adopted as the religion of the empire under the auspices of Marcus Aurelius instead of those of Constantine.
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Trade is a social act. Whoever undertakes to sell any description of any goods to the public, does what affects the interest of other persons, and of society in general; and thus his conduct, in principal, comes within the jurisdiction of society.
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So Long as we do not harm others we should be free to think, speak, act, & live as we see fit, without molestation from individuals, law, or gov't.
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A stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There could be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress.
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Political Economy, in truth, has never pretended to give advice to mankind with no lights but its own; though people who knew nothing but political economy (and therefore knew it ill) have taken upon themselves to advise, and could only do so by such lights as they had.
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The study of science teaches young men to think, while study of the classics teaches them to express thought.
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In all intellectual debates, both sides tend to be correct in what they affirm, and wrong in what they deny.
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He who lets the world choose his plan of life for him has need of no other faculty than that of ape-like imitation.
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The best state for human nature is that in which, while no one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear being thrust back by the efforts of others to push themselves forward.
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A person's taste is as much his own peculiar concern as his opinion or his purse.
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A person should be free to do as he likes in his own concerns; but he ought not to be free to do as he likes in acting for another, under the pretext that the affairs of the other are his own affairs.
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Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness.
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The demand for commodities is not the demand for labor.
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Customs are made for customary circumstances, and customary characters.
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Most boys or youths who have had much knowledge drilled into them, have their mental capacities not strengthened, but overlaid by it. They are crammed with mere facts, and with the opinions and phrases of other people, and these are accepted as a substitute for the power to form opinions of their own. And thus, the sons of eminent fathers, who have spared no pains in their education, so often grow up mere parroters of what they have learnt, incapable of using their minds except in the furrows traced for them.
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Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom.
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It is given to no human being to stereotype a set of truths, and walk safely by their guidance with his mind's eye closed.