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John Stuart Mill Quotes (1806-1873)
Philosopher
About John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill (20 May 1806 – 8 May 1873), also known as J. S. Mill, was an English political philosopher and economist who was an advocate of utilitarianism.
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Explore our curated collection of the most famous and impactful John Stuart Mill quotes.
“A bureaucracy always tends to become a pedantocracy.”
“Landlords... grow richer, as it were in their sleep, without working, risking, or economizing.”
“It is not because men's desires are strong that they act ill; it is because their consciences are weak.”
“Nothing contributes more to nourish elevation of sentiments in a people, than the large and free character of their habitations.”
“Wisdom and contrivance are shown in overcoming difficulties, so there is no place for them in a Being for whom no difficulties exist”
“I well knew that to propose something which would be called extreme, was the true way not to impede but to facilitate a more moderate experiment.”
“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.”
“The utilitarian doctrine is, that happiness is desirable, and the only thing desirable, as an end; all other things being only desirable as means to that end.”
“Since the state must necessarily provide subsistence for the criminal poor while undergoing punishment, not to do the same for the poor who have not offended is to give a premium on crime.”
“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.”
“I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being.”
“For my own part, not believing in universal selfishness, I have no difficulty in admitting that Communism would even now be practicable among the elite of mankind, and may become so among the rest.”
“The best state for human nature is that in which, while no one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear being thrust back by the efforts of others to push themselves forward.”
“The reasons for legal intervention in favour of children, apply not less strongly to the case of those unfortunate slaves and victims of the most brutal part of mankind, the lower animals.”
“I frequently asked myself, if I could, or if I was bound to go on living, when life must be passed in this manner. I generally answered to myself, that I did not think I could possibly bear it beyond a year.”
“The world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments—of those most distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue—are complete sceptics in religion...”
“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.”
“Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think.”
“It is also a study peculiarly adapted to an early stage in the education of philosophical students, since it does not presuppose the slow process of acquiring, by experience and reflection, valuable thoughts of their own.”
“[T]he application of algebra to geometry... far more than any of his metaphysical speculations, has immortalized the name of Descartes, and constitutes the greatest single step ever made in the progress of the exact sciences.”
“Persons of genius, it is true, are, and are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow. Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom.”
John Stuart Mill Quotes by Topic
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John Stuart Mill on Utilitarianism 11 quotes
“All desirable things...are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain.”
John Stuart Mill on Inductive reasoning 6 quotes
“Induction may be defined the operation of discovering and proving general propositions.”
John Stuart Mill on Government 4 quotes
View all 4 quotes on Government →John Stuart Mill on Freedom 4 quotes
“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.”
John Stuart Mill on Individualism 3 quotes
“But society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal impulses and preferences.”
John Stuart Mill on Opinion 3 quotes
“If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”
John Stuart Mill on Philosophy of science 3 quotes
“[T]he only thing that I believe that I am really fit for is the investigation of abstract truth, and the more abstract the better. If there is any science that I am capable of promoting, I think it is the science of science itself, the science of investigation, of method.”
John Stuart Mill on Civilization 2 quotes
“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.”
John Stuart Mill on Basic income 2 quotes
“Since the state must necessarily provide subsistence for the criminal poor while undergoing punishment, not to do the same for the poor who have not offended is to give a premium on crime.”
John Stuart Mill on Freedom of speech 2 quotes
“Strange it is that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free speech but object to their being "pushed to an extreme", not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case.”
John Stuart Mill on Wild animal suffering 2 quotes
“In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another, are nature's every day performances. ... The phrases which ascribe perfection to the course of nature can only be considered as the exaggerations of poetic or devotional feeling, not intended to stand the test of a sober examination. No one, either religious or irreligious, believes that the hurtful agencies of nature, considered as a whole, promote good purposes, in any other way than by inciting human rational creatures to rise up and struggle against them.”
John Stuart Mill on Nature 2 quotes
“In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another, are nature's every day performances. [...] The phrases which ascribe perfection to the course of nature can only be considered as the exaggerations of poetic or devotional feeling, not intended to stand the test of a sober examination. No one, either religious or irreligious, believes that the hurtful agencies of nature, considered as a whole, promote good purposes, in any other way than by inciting human rational creatures to rise up and struggle against them.”
What John Stuart Mill Said About Others
Discover personal opinions John Stuart Mill shared regarding contemporaries.
John Stuart Mill on Women 5 quotes
“The most important thing women have to do is to stir up the zeal of women themselves.”
John Stuart Mill on Jeremy Bentham 4 quotes
“He found the philosophy of law a chaos, he left it a science: he found the practice of the law an Augean stable, he turned the river into it which is mining and sweeping away mound after mound of its rubbish.”
John Stuart Mill on Samuel Taylor Coleridge 3 quotes
“He has been the great awakener in this country of the spirit of philosophy, within the bounds of traditional opinions.”
John Stuart Mill on John Locke 2 quotes
View all 2 quotes on John Locke →John Stuart Mill on Thomas Carlyle 2 quotes
“This is not so much a history, as an epic poem; and notwithstanding, or even in consequence of this, the truest of histories. It is the history of the French Revolution, and the poetry of it, both in one; and on the whole no work of greater genius, either historical or poetical, has been produced in this country for many years.”
John Stuart Mill on Alexis de Tocqueville 2 quotes
“In that remarkable work [Democracy in America], the excellences of democracy were pointed out in a more conclusive, because a more specific manner than I had ever known them to be, even by the most enthusiastic democrats; while the specific dangers which beset democracy, considered as the government of the numerical majority, were brought into equally strong light, and subjected to a masterly analysis, not as reasons for resisting what the author considered as an inevitable result of human progress, but as indications of the weak points of popular government, the defences by which it needs to be guarded, and the correctives which must be added to it in order that while full play is given to its beneficial tendencies, those which are of a different nature may be neutralized or mitigated.”
John Stuart Mill on Adlai Stevenson II
“That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often becomes the height of wisdom in the next.”
John Stuart Mill on Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston
“I would walk twenty miles to see him [Palmerston] hanged especially if Thiers were to be strung up with him.”
John Stuart Mill on Soame Jenyns
“Soames Jenyns and his more celebrated reviewer, Dr. Johnson, as explicitly as Bentham, laid down the doctrine that utility is the foundation of morals.”
John Stuart Mill on David Hartley (philosopher)
“The only one of Lockes successors who attempted,and achieved, any considerable improvement and extension of the analytical part, and thereby added anything to the explanation of the human mind on Locke's principles, was Hartley.”
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John Stuart Mill on Constantine the Great
“It is a bitter thought, how different a thing the Christianity of the world might have been, if the Christian faith had been adopted as the religion of the empire under the auspices of Marcus Aurelius instead of those of Constantine.”
John Stuart Mill on William Wordsworth
“I needed to be made to feel that there was real, permanent happiness in tranquil contemplation. Wordsworth taught me this, not only without turning away from, but with a greatly increased interest in, the common feelings and common destiny of human beings.”
Quotes About John Stuart Mill
Gain deeper perspective through quotes about John Stuart Mill from others.
Lord Acton on John Stuart Mill
“Mill's great merit was the defence of the minority, [and of the rights of minorities].”
Lord Amberley on John Stuart Mill
Arthur Balfour on John Stuart Mill
“I went to Cambridge in the middle [eighteen] sixties... Mill possessed at that time an authority in the English Universities...comparable to that wielded forty years earlier by Hegel in Germany and in the Middle Ages by Aristotle.”
Edmund Clerihew Bentley on John Stuart Mill
“John Stuart Mill, By a mighty effort of will, Overcame his natural bonhomie And wrote ‘Principles of Political Economy’.”
Alan Bullock on John Stuart Mill 2 quotes
“In his On Liberty (1858) and in his Representative Government (1861) Mill produces formal arguments which are designed to show that liberty, in particular liberty of thought and expression, is necessary for the development of human society. Progress, he argues, depends upon the freedom of individuals to innovate and experiment; conformity inevitably produces stagnation. This is the utilitarian basis of his argument against fully fledged democracy, that it is likely to produce a tyranny of the majority which will stifle those individual forces in society which give it life and meaning. For James Mill democracy had been a weapon to destroy the power of the 'sinister interest'; for his son it was a potential threat to liberty and social diversity, the mainsprings of human progress.”
Thomas Carlyle on John Stuart Mill
G. K. Chesterton on John Stuart Mill
“In any case the soul of Bentham (if he had one) went marching on, like John Brown; and in the central Victorian movement it was certainly he who won. John Stuart Mill was the final flower of that growth. He was himself fresh and delicate and pure; but that is the business of a flower. Though he had to preach a hard rationalism in religion, a hard competition in economics, a hard egoism in ethics, his own soul had all that silvery sensitiveness that can be seen in his fine portrait by Watts. He boasted none of that brutal optimism with which his friends and followers of the Manchester School expounded their cheery negations. There was about Mill even a sort of embarrassment; he exhibited all the wheels of his iron universe rather reluctantly, like a gentleman in trade showing ladies over his factory. There shone in him a beautiful reverence for women, which is all the more touching because, in his department, as it were, he could only offer them so dry a gift as the Victorian Parliamentary Franchise.”
Stefan Collini on John Stuart Mill 2 quotes
“His systematic account of the nature and methods of 'science', in the broadest sense, attained an authority in England that was positively papal.”
Robert A. Dahl on John Stuart Mill 2 quotes
“Even when J. S. Mill contended that some pleasures are better than others, he continued to assume the axiom, for to Mill as to Bentham the relative value of an object or activity depended on its contribution to the pleasure or happiness of the recipient, not on the intrinsic and peculiar worth of the recipient.”
Charles Darwin on John Stuart Mill
“Mr. J. S. Mill speaks, in his celebrated work, Utilitarianism, (1864, pp. 45, 46), of the social feelings as a "powerful natural sentiment," and as "the natural basis of sentiment for utilitarian morality." Again he says, "Like the other acquired capacities above referred to, the moral faculty, if not a part of our nature, is a natural out-growth from it; capable, like them, in a certain small degree of springing up spontaneously." But in opposition to all this, he also remarks, "if, as in my own belief, the moral feelings are not innate, but acquired, they are not for that reason less natural." It is with hesitation that I venture to differ at all from so profound a thinker, but it can hardly be disputed that the social feelings are instinctive or innate in the lower animals; and why should they not be so in man? Mr. Bain (see, for instance, The Emotions and the Will, 1865, p. 481) and others believe that the moral sense is acquired by each individual during his lifetime. On the general theory of evolution this is at least extremely improbable. The ignoring of all transmitted mental qualities will, as it seems to me, be hereafter judged as a most serious blemish in the works of Mr. Mill.”
Benjamin Disraeli on John Stuart Mill
Alan Ebenstein on John Stuart Mill
“Neither Hayek nor Mill accurately or consistently stated the libertarian standard for appropriate coercive involvement in the lives of others. This standard is exclusively to prevent harm to others.”
Disputed Quotes
Quotes attributed to John Stuart Mill that are questionable.
“I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than in attempting to satisfy them.”
Misattributed Quotes
Quotes mistakenly credited to John Stuart Mill
About John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill (20 May 1806 – 8 May 1873), also known as J. S. Mill, was an English political philosopher and economist who was an advocate of utilitarianism.