99+ John Stuart Mill Quotes on Duty, Action and Actual quote - Quotes.pub

Here you will find all the famous John Stuart Mill quotes. There are more than 99+ quotes in our John Stuart Mill quotes collection. We have collected all of them and made stunning John Stuart Mill wallpapers & posters out of those quotes. You can use this wallpapers & posters on mobile, desktop, print and frame them or share them on the various social media platforms. You can download the quotes images in various different sizes for free. In the below list you can find quotes in various categories like Duty, Action and Actual quote

Who doubts that there may be great goodness, and great happiness, and great affection under the absolute government of a good man? Meanwhile, laws and institutions require to be adapted, not to good men, but to bad.

In England, from the peculiar circumstances of our political history, though the yoke of opinion is perhaps heavier, that of law is lighter, than in most other countries of Europe; and there is considerable jealousy of direct interference, by the legislative or the executive power, with private conduct; not so much from any just regard for the independence of the individual, as from the still subsisting habit of looking on the government as representing an opposite interest to the public.

I had learnt from experience that many false opinions may be exchanged for true ones, without in the least altering the habits of mind of which false opinions are made.

A government with all this mass of favours to give or to withhold, however free in name, wields a power of bribery scarcely surpassed by an avowed autocracy, rendering it master of the elections in almost any circumstances but those of rare and extraordinary public excitement.

A world from which solitude is extirpated, is a very poor ideal.

When the land is cultivated entirely by the spade and no horses are kept, a cow is kept for every three acres of land.

It is useless for me to say that those who maintain the doctrine that men have a right to command and women are under an obligation to obey, or that men are fit for government and women unfit, are on the affirmative side of the question, and that they are bound to show positive evidence for the assertions, or submit to their rejection.

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

The demand for commodities is not the demand for labor.

The despotism of custom is on the wane. We are not content to know that things are; we ask whether they ought to be.

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.

He who cannot by his labor suffice for his own support has no claim to the privilege of helping himself to the money of others. By becoming dependent on the remaining members of the community for actual subsistence, he abdicates his claim to equal rights for them I other respects.

With equality of experience and of general faculties, a woman usually sees much more than a man of what is immediately before her.

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

It is conceivable that religion may be morally useful without being intellectually sustainable.

Men might as well be imprisoned, as excluded from the means of earning their bread.

The successful conduct of an industrial enterprise requires two quite distinct qualifications: fidelity and zeal.

All attempts by the State to bias the conclusions of its citizens on disputed subjects, are evil.

A being who can create a race of men devoid of real freedom and inevitably foredoomed to be sinners, and then punish them for being what he has made them, may be omnipotent and various other things, but he is not what the English language has always intended by the adjective holy.

All free communities have both been more exempt from social injustice and crime, and have attained more brilliant prosperity, than any others, or than they themselves after they have lost their freedom.

Judgement is given to men that they may use it. Because it may be used erroneously, are men to be told that they ought not to use it at all?

It might be plausibly maintained, that in almost every one of the leading controversies, past or present, in social philosophy, both sides were in the right in what they affirmed, though wrong in what they denied.

It is with philosophy as with religion : men marvel at the absurdity of other people’s tenets, while exactly parallel absurdities remain in their own.

It would not be easy even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete, than to endeavor so to live that Christ would approve our life.

The feeling of a direct responsibility of the individual to God is almost wholly a creation of Protestantism.

Again, defenders of utility often find themselves called upon to reply to such objections as this – that there is not time, previous to action, for calculating and weighing the effects of any line of conduct on the general happiness. This is exactly as if any one were to say that it is impossible to guide our conduct by Christianity, because there is not time, on every occasion on which anything has to be done, to read through the Old and New Testaments.

A stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There could be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress.

That a thing is peculiar; is no argument for its being blamable; since the most criminal actions are to a being like man not more unnatural than most of the virtues.

Since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinion that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.

God is a word to express, not our ideas, but the want of them.

He who lets the world choose his plan of life for him has need of no other faculty than that of ape-like imitation.

The only power deserving the name is that of masses, and of governments while they make themselves the organ of the tendencies and instincts of masses.

The utilitarian morality does recognise in human beings the power of sacrificing their own greatest good for the good of others. It only refuses to admit that the sacrifice is itself a good. A sacrifice which does not increase, or tend to increase, the sum total of happiness, it considers as wasted.

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

The great majority of those who speak of perfectibility as a dream, do so because they feel that it is one which would afford them no pleasure if it were realized.

The form of association, however, which if mankind continue to improve, must be expected in the end to predominate, is not that which can exist between a capitalist as chief, and work-people without a voice in the management, but the association of the labourers themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning the capital with which they carry on their operations, and working under managers elected and removable by themselves.

If religious belief be indeed so necessary to mankind, as we are continually assured that it is, there is great reason to lament, that the intellectual grounds of it should require to be backed by moral bribery or subornation of the understanding.

If I have accomplished anything, I owe it, among other fortunate circumstances, to the fact that through the early training bestowed on me by my father, I started, I may fairly say, with an advantage of a quarter of a century over my contemporaries.

It can do truth no service to blind the fact, known to all who have the most ordinary acquaintance with literary history, that a large portion of the noblest and most valuable moral teaching has been the work not only of men who did not know, but of men who knew and rejected the Christian faith.

Is there any moral enormity which might not be justified by imitation of such a Deity?

They who know how to employ opportunities will often find that they can create them; and what we can achieve depends less on the amount of time we possess than on the use we make of our time.

A person should be free to do as he likes in his own concerns; but he ought not to be free to do as he likes in acting for another, under the pretext that the affairs of the other are his own affairs.

In the human mind, one-sidedness has always been the rule, and many-sidedness the exception. Hence, even in revolutions of opinion, one part of the truth usually sets while another rises.

Miracles have no claim whatever to the character of historical facts and are wholly invalid as evidence of any revelation.

The guesses which serve to give mental unity and wholeness to a chaos of scattered particulars, are accidents which rarely occur to any minds but those abounding in knowledge and disciplined in intellectual combinations.

On religion in particular, the time appears to me to have come, when it is a duty of all who, being qualified in point of knowledge, have, on mature consideration, satisfied themselves that the current opinions are not only false, but hurtful, to make their dissent known.

To say that secular means irreligious implies that all the arts and sciences are irreligious, and is very like saying that all professions except that of the law are illegal.

Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of the representative government, cannot exist.

In this age, the man who dares to think for himself and to act independently does a service to his race.

Almost all rich veins of original and striking speculation have been opened by systematic half-thinkers.

1
2
3
4
5