John Stuart Mill Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
France has done more for even English history than England has.
-
All good things which exist are the fruits of originality.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The great majority of those who speak of perfectibility as a dream, do so because they feel that it is one which would afford them no pleasure if it were realized.
-
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.
-
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.
-
My father taught me that the question Who made me? cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question, Who made God?
-
The study of science teaches young men to think, while study of the classics teaches them to express thought.
-
Political Economy as a branch of science is extremely modern; but the subject with which its enquiries are conversant has in all ages necessarily constituted one of the chief practical interests of mankind.
-
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.
-
Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion, is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action.
-
Customs are made for customary circumstances, and customary characters.
-
What distinguishes the majority of men from the few is their inability to act according to their beliefs.
-
The disease which inflicts bureaucracy and what they usually die from is routine.
-
God is a word to express, not our ideas, but the want of them.
-
I am not aware that any community has a right to force another to be civilized.
-
Human beings are not like sheep; and even sheep are not undistinguishably alike. A man cannot get a coat or a pair oboots to fit him, unless they are either made to his measure, or he has a whole warehouseful to choose from: and is it easier to fit him with a life than with a coat, or are human beings more like one another in their whole physical and spiritual conformation than in the shape of their feet? If it were only that people have diversities of taste, that is reason enough for not attempting to shape them all after one model.
-
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.
-
Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.
-
On religion in particular, the time appears to me to have come, when it is a duty of all who, being qualified in point of knowledge, have, on mature consideration, satisfied themselves that the current opinions are not only false, but hurtful, to make their dissent known.
-
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.