John Stuart Mill Quotes

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.

The love of power and the love of liberty are in eternal antagonism.

When the land is cultivated entirely by the spade, and no horses are kept, a cow is kept for every three acres of land.

Men are men before they are lawyers, or physicians, or merchants, or manufacturers; and if you make them capable and sensible men, they will make themselves capable and sensible lawyers or physicians.

To understand one woman is not necessarily to understand any other woman.

The dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes.

If it were only that people have diversities of taste, that is reason enough for not attempting to shape them all after one model. But different persons also require different conditions for their spiritual development, and can no more exist healthily in the same moral, than all the varieties of plants can in the same physical, atmosphere and climate.

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.

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. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more mportant 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.

Men do not desire merely to be rich, but to be richer than other men.

It is not because men's desires are strong that they act ill; it is because their consciences are weak. There is no natural connection between strong impulses and a weak conscience.

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it.

Originality is the one thing which unoriginal minds cannot feel the use of... They are more in need of originality, the less they are conscious of the want.

There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home.

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.

It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being.

All good things which exist are the fruits of originality.

That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of our time.

Popular opinions, on subjects not palpable to sense, are often true, but seldom or never the whole truth.

The pupil who is never required to do what he cannot do, never does what he can do.