John Stuart Mill Quotes

323 Sourced Quotes

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

John Stuart Mill
The character of necessity ascribed to the truths of mathematics and even the peculiar certainty attributed to them is an illusion.

John Stuart Mill
The truth that every fact which has a beginning has a cause, is coextensive with human experience.

John Stuart Mill
The average condition of the people improving or deteriorating, depends upon whether population is advancing faster than improvement, or improvement than population.

John Stuart Mill
The true virtue of human beings is fitness to live together as equals; claiming nothing for themselves but what they as freely concede to everyone else; regarding command of any kind as an exceptional neccessity, and in all cases a temporary one.

John Stuart Mill
Though it is only in a very imperfect state of the world's arrangements that anyone can best serve the happiness of others by the absolute sacrifice of his own, yet, so long as the world is in that imperfect state, I fully acknowledge that the readiness to make such a sacrifice is the highest virtue which can be found in man.

John Stuart Mill
Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their sentiments.

John Stuart Mill
Our conception of the past is not drawn from its own records, but from books written about it, containing not the facts, but a view of the facts which has shaped itself in the mind of somebody of our own or a very recent time.

John Stuart Mill
In almost every act of our perceiving faculties, observation and inference are intimately blended. What we are said to observe is usually a compound result, of which one-tenth may be observation and the remaining nine-tenths inference.

John Stuart Mill
Nature means the sum of all phenomena, together with the causes which produce them; including not only all that happens, but all that is capable of happening.

John Stuart Mill
A democratic constitution, not supported by democratic institutions in detail, but confined to the central government, not only is not political freedom, but often creates a spirit precisely the reverse, carrying down to the lowest grade in society the desire and ambition of political domination.

John Stuart Mill
Induction is a process of inference; it proceeds from the known to the unknown.

John Stuart Mill
Every established fact which is too bad to admit of any other defence is always presented to us as an injunction of religion.

John Stuart Mill
What is contrary to women's nature to do, they never will be made to do by simply giving their nature free play.

John Stuart Mill
Hardly any original thoughts on mental or social subjects ever make their way among mankind or assume their proper importance in the minds even of their inventors, until aptly selected words or phrases have as it were nailed them down and held them fast.

John Stuart Mill
If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger, but not a happier or a better population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it.

John Stuart Mill
The cause, then, philosophically speaking, is the sum total of the conditions, positive and negative, taken together; the whole of the contingencies of every description, which being realized, the consequent invariably follows.

John Stuart Mill
Each undervalues that part of the materials of thought with which he is not familiar.

John Stuart Mill
There is a very real evil consequent on ascribing supernatural origin to the received maxilms of morality. That origin consecrates the whole of them and protects them from being discussed or criticized.

John Stuart Mill
To account for a law of nature means, and can mean, no more than to assign other laws more general, together with collocations, which laws and collocations being supposed, the partial law follows without any additional supposition.

John Stuart Mill
To mistake money for wealth, is the same sort of error as to mistake the highway which may be the easiest way of getting to your house or lands, for the house and lands themselves.

John Stuart Mill
It is only in the backward countries of the world that increased production is still an important object.

John Stuart Mill
Not only the grounds of the opinion are forgotten in the absence of discussion, but too often the meaning of the opinion itself... Instead of a vivid conception and a living belief, there remain only a few phrases retained by rote; or, if any part, the shell and husk only of the meaning is retained, the finer essence being lost.

John Stuart Mill
The maxim is, that whatever can be affirmed (or denied) of a class, may be affirmed (or denied) of everything included in the class. This axiom, supposed to be the basis of the syllogistic theory, is termed by logicians the dictum de omni et nullo.

John Stuart Mill
As often as a study is cultivated by narrow minds, they will draw from it narrow conclusions.

John Stuart Mill
Customs are made for customary circumstances, and customary characters.

John Stuart Mill
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.

John Stuart Mill
If opponents of all important truths do not exist, it is indispensable to imagine them and supply them with the strongest arguments which the most skillful devil's advocate can conjure up.

John Stuart Mill
An hypothesis being a mere supposition, there are no other limits to hypotheses than those of the human imagination; we may, if we please, imagine, by way of accounting for an effect, some cause of a kind utterly unknown, and acting according to a law altogether fictitious.

John Stuart Mill
Among the works of man, which human life is rightly employed in perfecting, the first in importance surely is man himself.

John Stuart Mill