John Stuart Mill's Quotes

Pleasure and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends.

The disease which inflicts bureaucracy and what they usually die from is routine.

We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and even if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.

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.

The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.

The most cogent reason for restricting the interference of government is the great evil of adding unnecessarily to its power.

The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

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

Men might as well be imprisoned, as excluded from the means of earning their bread.

No slave is a slave to the same lengths, and in so full a sense of the word, as a wife is.

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

The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement.

Unquestionably, it is possible to do without happiness; it is done involuntarily by nineteen-twentieths of mankind.

As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.

The only power deserving the name is that of masses, and of governments while they make themselves the organ of the tendencies and instincts of masses.

All political revolutions, not affected by foreign conquest, originate in moral revolutions. The subversion of established institutions is merely one consequence of the previous subversion of established opinions.

As for charity, it is a matter in which the immediate effect on the persons directly concerned, and the ultimate consequence to the general good, are apt to be at complete war with one another.

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

We have a right, also, in various ways, to act upon our unfavorable opinion of anyone, not to the oppression of his individuality, but in the exercise of ours.

Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure and the absence of pain.

All action is for the sake of some end; and rules of action, it seems natural to suppose, must take their whole character and color from the end to which they are subservient.

All desirable things... are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as a means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain.

Of two pleasures, if there be one which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure.

Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative.

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.