John Stuart Mill

Quotes

• “I never turned recreant to intellectual culture, or ceased to consider the power and practice of analysis as an essentia...”
• “In bodily presence, though not commanding, at sixty he was attractive, spare in build, his voice low but harmonious, his...”
• “The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or thing, having an indep...”
• “It was the period of my mental progress which I have now reached that I formed the friendship which has been the honour ...”
• “The entire history of social improvement has been a series of transitions, by which one custom or institution after anot...”
• “If it be said, that an Omnipotent Creator, though under no necessity of employing contrivances such as man must use, tho...”
• “The art of music is good, for the reason, among others, that it produces pleasure; but what proof is it possible to give...”
• “All honour to those who can abnegate for themselves the personal enjoyment of life, when by such renunciation they contr...”
• “A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mold in wh...”
• “There is no author to whom my father thought himself more indebted for his own mental culture, than Plato, or whom he mo...”
• “Moreover, if the character is formed, and the mind made up, on the few cardinal points of human opinion, agreement of co...”
• “[My father] impressed upon me from the first, that the manner in which the world came into existence was a subject on wh...”
• “A Turk thinks, or used to think (for even Turks are wiser now-a-days), that society would be on a sandbank if women were...”
• “Unbelievers (so called) as well as of believers, there are many species, including almost every variety of moral type. B...”
• “No one can be a great thinker who does not recognise, that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to ...”
• “Capacity for the nobler feelings is in most natures a very tender plant, easily killed, not only by hostile influences, ...”
• “For passionate emotions of all sorts, and for everything which has been said or written in exaltation of them, he profes...”
• “All those to whom I looked up, were of opinion that the pleasure of sympathy with human beings, and the feelings which m...”
• “We need not suppose that when power resides in an exclusive class, that class will knowingly and deliberately sacrifice ...”
• “Whatever is known to us by consciousness, is known beyond possibility of question. What one sees or feels, whether bodil...”
• “That power should be exercised over any portion of mankind without any obligation of consulting them, is only tolerable ...”
• “People are not aware how entirely, in former ages, the law of superior strength was the rule of life; how publicly and o...”
• “Kant and Mill disagree about many things - even basic things - not only about the substantive foundations of ethics but ...”
• “The possession and the exercise of political, and among others of electoral, rights, is one of the chief instruments bot...”
• “To think that because those who wield power in society wield in the end that of government, therefore it is of no use to...”
• “Ideas are not everything in a teacher, vital though they may be. Mill's merit was the extension of them in spirit and le...”
• “The heart of Mill's argument for the cause of Liberty transcends the utilitarian. In pages which are the classical expre...”
• “Since reasoning, or inference, the principal subject of logic, is an operation which usually takes place by means of wor...”
• “[E]xperience has taught me that those who give their time to the absorbing claims of what is called society, not having ...”
• “[M]y father's rejection of all that is called religious belief, was not, as many might suppose, primarily a matter of lo...”
• “As there were black swans, though civilized people had existed for three thousand years on the earth without meeting wit...”
• “The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions ar...”
• “But, in my state of mind, this appearance of superiority to illusion added to the effect which Bentham's doctrines produ...”
• “When the term "Western civilization" is equated with racism, cultural superiority and pervasive oppression, and students...”
• “Granted that any practice causes more pain to animals than it gives pleasure to man; is that practice moral or immoral? ...”
• “The remedies for all our diseases will be discovered long after we are dead; and the world will be made a fit place to l...”
• “What, in unenlightened societies, colour, race, religion, or in the case of a conquered country, nationality, are to som...”
• “I believe that he was literally the only person who was in the least impressed by her. Mrs. Grote said briefly that she ...”
• “Society should treat all equally well who have deserved equally well of it, that is, who have deserved equally well abso...”
• “Misquoted as "I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are ge...”
• “Compared with the greatest poets, he may be said to be the poet of unpoetical natures, possessed of quiet and contemplat...”
• “The experiences of this period had two very marked effects on my opinions and character. In the first place, they led me...”
• “He was a friend of my parents, and I didn't know him through that because my parents died when I was quite tiny; but nev...”
• “Even when J. S. Mill contended that some pleasures are better than others, he continued to assume the axiom, for to Mill...”
• “In the course of instruction which I have partially retraced, the point most superficially apparent is the great effort ...”
• “Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happin...”
• “In early times, the great majority of the male sex were slaves, as well as the whole of the female. And many ages elapse...”
• “It is an uphill race, and a race against time, for if the American form of democracy overtakes us first, the majority wi...”
• “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able...”
• “In a Parliamentary debate with the Conservative MP, John Pakington (May 31, 1866). Hansard, vol 183, col 1592]. Pakingto...”