Quotes By John Stuart Mill

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

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

Life has a certain flavor for those who have fought and risked all that the sheltered and protected can never experience.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

In all intellectual debates, both sides tend to be correct in what they affirm, and wrong in what they deny.

The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good, in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.

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

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.

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.

A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.

What distinguishes the majority of men from the few is their inability to act according to their beliefs.

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

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.

The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.