John Mill Quotes

"Though the practice of chivalry fell even more sadly short of its theoretic standard than practice generally falls below theory, it remains one of the most precious monuments of the moral history of our race, as a remarkable instance of a concerted and organized attempt by a most disorganized and distracted society, to raise up and carry into practice a moral ideal greatly in advance of its social condition and institutions; so much so as to have been completely frustrated in the main object, yet never entirely inefficacious, and which has left a most sensible, and for the most part a highly valuable impress on the ideas and feelings of all subsequent times."

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

"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."

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

"The idea that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of those pleasant falsehoods, which most experience refutes. History is teeming with instances of truth put down by persecution. If not put down forever, it may be set back for centuries."

"Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror."

"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."

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

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

"That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often becomes the height of wisdom in the next"

"The price paid for intellectual pacification is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind"

"The struggle between Liberty and Authority is the most conspicuous feature in the portions of history with which we are earliest familiar; particularly in that of Greece, Rome, and England"

"The dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of the pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes."

"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"

"The only part of the conduct of anyone for which he is amenable to society is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign."

"To understand one woman is not necessarily to understand any other woman."

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

"The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good, in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it."

"Language is the light of the mind"

"All that makes existence valuable to any one depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people."