John Stuart Mill Quotes, Quotations, and Sayings

21 Famous Quotes by John Stuart Mill
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“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. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”
Opinions Quotes
“Originality is the one thing which unoriginal minds cannot feel the use of.”
Originality Quotes
“Politics is the conspiracy of the unproductive but organized against the productive but unorganized.”
Politics Quotes
“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.”
Prevention Quotes
“A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.”
Stability Quotes
“When the land is cultivated entirely by the spade, and no horses are kept, a cow is kept for every three acres of land.”
Agriculture Quotes
Source: Principles of Political Economy (bk. II, ch. VI, sec, V)
“Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so.”
Happiness Quotes
“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.”
Knowledge Quotes
“One person with a belief is equal to a force of ninety-nine who have only interests.”
Beliefs Quotes
“Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained.”
Eccentricity Quotes
“We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and even if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.”
Repression Quotes
“Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.”
Politics / government Quotes
“That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often becomes the height of wisdom in the next.”
Advice / experience / wisdom Quotes
“Commemoration of Richard Rolle of Hampole, Writer, Hermit, Mystic, 1349 It is of no use to say that Christ, as exhibited in the Gospels, is not historical, and that we know not how much of what is admirable has been super-added by the tradition of his followers. Who among his disciples or among their proselytes was capable of inventing the sayings of Jesus or of imagining the life and character revealed in the Gospels? Certainly not the fishermen of Galilee; as certainly not St. Paul, whose character and idiosyncrasies were of a totally different sort; still less the early Christian writers, in whom nothing is more evident than that the good which was in them was all derived, as they always professed that it was derived, from the higher source.”
Christianity Quotes
“It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being.”
Computer / technology / science Quotes
“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.”
Man Quotes
“The general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind.”
Mediocrity Quotes
“Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so.”
Melancholy Quotes
“That miscellaneous collection of a few wise and many foolish individuals, called the public.”
Public speaking Quotes
“One person with a belief is equal to a force of ninety-nine who have only interests.”
Religion / beliefs Quotes
“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.”
War Quotes
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