John Stuart Mill Quotes
-
Landlords grow rich in their sleep without working, risking or economizing. The increase in the value of land, arising as it does from the efforts of an entire community, should belong to the community and not to the individual who might hold title.
-
[A] man and still more the woman, who can be accused either of doing "what nobody does," or of not doing "what everybody does," is the subject of as much depreciatory remark as if he or she had committed some grave moral delinquency.
-
The price paid for intellectual pacification is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind.
-
Seeming contentment is real discontent, combined with indolence or self-indulgence, which, while taking no legitimate means of raising itself, delights in bringing others down to its own level.
-
Christian morality (so called) has all the characters of a reaction.... In its horror of sensuality, it made an idol of asceticism, which has been gradually compromised away into one of legality. It holds out the hope of heaven and the threat of hell, as the appointed and appropriate motives to a virtuous life - in this falling far below the best of the ancients, and doing what lies in it to give to human morality an essentially selfish character.... It is essentially a doctrine of passive obedience; it inculcates submission to all authorities found established.
-
The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement.
-
There is no 'one-size-fits-all' way to build an audience.
-
The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.
-
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.
-
I had always heard it maintained by my father, and was myself convinced, that the object of education should be to form the strongest possible associations of the salutary class; associations of pleasure with all things beneficial to the great whole, and of pain with all things hurtful to it.
-
History shows that great economic and social forces flow like a tide over communities only half conscious of that which is befalling them. Wise statesmen foresee what time is thus bringing, and try to shape institutions and mold men's thoughts and purposes in accordance with the change that is silently coming on. The unwise are those who bring nothing constructive to the process, and who greatly imperil the future of mankind by leaving great questions to be fought out between ignorant change on one hand and ignorant opposition to change on the other.
-
So much barbarism, however, still remains in the transactions of most civilized nations, that almost all independent countries choose to assert their nationality by having, to their inconvenience and that of their neighbors, a peculiar currency of their own.
-
But society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal Impulses and preferences.
-
All women are brought up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that of men; not self-will, and government by self-control, but submission and yielding to the control of others. All the moralities tell them that it is their nature to live for others; to make complete abnegation of themselves, and to have no life but in their affections.
-
Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character had abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and courage which it contained.
-
To do as one would be done by, and to love one's neighbour as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality.
-
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.
-
In its narrowest acceptation, order means obedience. A government is said to preserve order if it succeeds in getting itself obeyed.
-
He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.
-
Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.
-
Liberty lies in the rights of that person whose views you find most odious.
-
Laws and systems of polity always begin by recognizing the relations they find already existing between individuals.
-
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.
-
He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.