Quotes from John Stuart Mill

Among the facts of the universe to be accounted for, it may be said, is Mind; and it is self evident that nothing can have produced Mind but Mind.

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.

My father taught me that the question Who made me? cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question, Who made God?

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

All good things which exist are the fruits of originality.

Any participation, even in the smallest public function, is useful.

In its narrowest acceptation, order means obedience. A government is said to preserve order if it succeeds in getting itself obeyed.

Instead of the function of governing, for which it is radically unfit, the proper office of a representative assembly is to watch and control the government.

How can great minds be produced in a country where the test of great minds is agreeing in the opinion of small minds?

It is given to no human being to stereotype a set of truths, and walk safely by their guidance with his mind's eye closed.

Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure and the absence of pain.

Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.

There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home.

All the good of which humanity is capable is comprised in obedience.

There is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides.

Pleasure and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends.

The concessions of the privileged to the unprivileged are seldom brought about by any better motive than the power of the unprivileged to extort them.

Command and obedience are but unfortunate necessities of human life: society in equality is its normal state.

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

The ne plus ultra of wickedness ... is embodied in what is commonly presented to mankind as the creed of Christianity.

The world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments, of those distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue, are complete sceptics in religion.

The principle itself of dogmatic religion, dogmatic morality, dogmatic philosophy, is what requires to be booted out; not any particular manifestation of that principle.

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

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