John Stuart Mill Quotes
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Belief, thus, in the supernatural, great as are the services which it rendered in the early stages of human development, cannot be considered to be any longer required, either for enabling us to know what is right and wrong in social morality, or for supplying us with motives to do right and to abstain from wrong.
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Art is the employent of the powers of nature for an end.
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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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I conceive that the description so often given of a Benthamite, as a mere reasoning machine, though extremely inapplicable to most of those who have been designated by that title, was during two or three years of my life not altogether untrue of me.
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Customs are made for customary circumstances, and customary characters.
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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.
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The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental or spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.
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In my education, as in that of everyone, the moral influences, which are so much more important than all others, are also the most complicated, and the most difficult to specify with any approach to completeness.
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A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
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A people may prefer a free government, but if by momentary discouragement or temporary panic, or a fit of enthusiasm for an individual, they can be induced to lay their liberties at the feet of even a great man, or trust him with powers to subvert their institutions, in all these cases they are unfit for liberty.
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We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.
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The principle itself of dogmatic religion, dogmatic morality, dogmatic philosophy, is what requires to be booted out; not any particular manifestation of that principle.
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Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion, is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action.
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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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The only power deserving the name is that of masses, and of governments while they make themselves the organ of the tendencies and instincts of masses.
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France has done more for even English history than England has.
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Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them.
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I frequently asked myself, if I could, or if I was bound to go on living, when life must be passed in this manner.
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My previous education had been, in a certain sense, already a course of Benthamism. The Benthamic standard of 'the greatest happiness' was that which I had always been taught to apply.
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What, in unenlightened societies, colour, race, religion, or in the case of a conquered country, nationality, are to some men, sex is to all women; a peremptory exclusion from almost all honourable occupations, but either such as cannot be fulfilled by others, or such as those others do not think worthy of their acceptance.
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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.
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My father taught me that the question Who made me? cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question, Who made God?
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All good things which exist are the fruits of originality.
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The duty of man is the same in respect to his own nature as in respect to the nature of all other things, namely not to follow it but to amend it.