Quotes about John Stuart Mill

11 Sourced Quotes

The change began with John Stuart Mill and the Utopians. When Mill pointed out that economics had no ultimate solution to the problem of distribution, that society might do with the fruits of its toil as it saw fit, he introduced into the mechanical calculus of the market a conflicting calculus of moral judgment.

Robert Heilbroner

Perhaps the last philosopher who gave any significant attention to the privacy of the individual was Jeremy Bentham; his strongly expressed view that law was an invasion of privacy that must be justified on the ground of necessary utility was somewhat, but not profoundly, modified by John Stuart Mill.

I protest against deference to any man, whether John Stuart Mill, or Adam Smith, or Aristotle, being allowed to check inquiry. Our science has become far too much a stagnant one, in which opinions rather than experience and reason are appealed to.

William Stanley Jevons

Curiously enough, John Stuart Mill, although he must have been familiar with Longfield's writings, seems never to have touched upon this line of reasoning.

Like John Stuart Mill, he would often begin by stating the other side better than its advocate had stated it himself.

John Stuart Mill,
By a mighty effort of will,
Overcame his natural bonhomie
And wrote "Principles of Political Economy."

Edmund Clerihew Bentley

Human envy is certainly not one of the sources of discontent that a free society can eliminate. It is probably one of the essential conditions for the preservation of such a society that we do not countenance envy, not sanction its demands by camouflaging it as social justice, but treat it, in the words of John Stuart Mill, as 'the most anti-social and evil of all passions.'

Friedrich Hayek

Ask yourself whether you are happy', observed the philosopher John Stuart Mill, 'and you cease to be so.' At best, it would appear, happiness can only be glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, not stared at directly.

Oliver Burkeman

In 1960, the U.S. population was 89% white. By 1990, it was 76%. Today, it is under 70%. By 2050, white Americans, the most loyal voting bloc the Republican Party has, that provides 90% of all GOP votes, will be just another minority because of an immigration policy championed by Republicans. When John Stuart Mill called the Tories "the Stupid Party," he was not entirely wrong.

And, finally, there should be some gain of serenity in realizing how singularly consistent has been the run of economic law through the ages, and recalling, once more the reflection which John Stuart Mill arrived at some half-a-century ago, that, "Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being."

Thorstein Veblen

Marx rejects as absurd the contention made by John Stuart Mill, and many of the political economists, that while production is governed by definite laws, distribution is controlled by (malleable) human institutions. Such a view underlies the assumption that classes are merely inequalities in the distribution of income, and therefore that class conflict can be alleviated or even eliminated altogether by the introduction of measures which minimize discrepancies between incomes.

Anthony Giddens