Search quotes by author:    A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z 


John Stuart Mill Quotes


A man 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.

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

A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury.

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.

All good things which exist are the fruits of originality.

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.

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

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.

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.

Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.

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.

He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.

I am not aware that any community has a right to force another to be civilized.

I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than in attempting to satisfy them.

If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

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

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

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