-
my father's rejection of all that is called religious belief, was not, as many might suppose, primarily a matter of logic and evidence: the grounds of it were moral, still more than intellectual. He found it impossible to believe that a world so full of evil was the work of an Author combining infinite power with perfect goodness and righteousness.
John Stuart Mill -
This is what writers mean when they say that the notion of cause involves the idea of necessity. If there be any meaning which confessedly belongs to the term necessity, it is unconditionalness. That which is necessary, that which must be, means that which will be, whatever supposition we may make in regard to all other things.
John Stuart Mill
-
Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.
John Stuart Mill -
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 -
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 from thrust back, by the efforts of others to push themselves forward.
John Stuart Mill -
So true is that unnatural generally means only uncustomary, and that everything which is usual appears natural.
John Stuart Mill -
It would not be easy even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete, than to endeavor so to live that Christ would approve our life.
John Stuart Mill -
He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.
John Stuart Mill
-
How can great minds be produced in a country where the test of great minds is agreeing in the opinion of small minds?
John Stuart Mill -
The triumph of the Confederacy... would be a victory for the powers of evil which would give courage to the enemies of progress and damp the sprits of its friends all over the civilized world... [The American Civil War] is destined to be a turning point, for good or evil, of the course of human affairs.
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 -
So long as an opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses in stability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it.
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 -
Education is one of the subjects which most essentially require to be considered by various minds, and from a variety of points of view. For, of all many-sided subjects, it is the one which has the greatest number of sides.
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 that nothing is worth war is much worse.
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 -
A great statesman is he who knows when to depart from traditions, as well as when to adhere to them.
John Stuart Mill -
What a country wants to make it richer is never consumption, but production. Where there is the latter, we may be sure that there is no want of the former. To produce, implies that the producer de_sires to consume; why else should he give himself useless labor? He may not wish to consume what he himself produces, but his motive for producing and selling is the desire to buy. Therefore, if the producers generally produce and sell more and more, they certainly also buy more and more.
John Stuart Mill -
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.
John Stuart Mill -
Every one is degraded, whether aware of it or not, when other people, without consulting him, take upon themselves unlimited power to regulate his destiny.
John Stuart Mill
-
It often happens that the universal belief of one age of mankind — a belief from which no one was, nor without an extraordinary effort of genius and courage, could at that time be free — becomes to a subsequent age so palpable an absurdity, that the only difficulty then is to imagine how such a thing can ever have appeared credible.
John Stuart Mill -
Is there any moral enormity which might not be justified by imitation of such a Deity?
John Stuart Mill -
In this age, the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service.
John Stuart Mill -
If it were felt that the free development of individuality is one of the leading essentials of well-being; that it is not only a coordinate element with all that is designated by the terms civilisation, instruction, education, culture, but is itself a necessary part and condition of all those things; there would be no danger that liberty should be undervalued.
John Stuart Mill