John Stuart Mill Quotes

Yet the love of money is not only one of the strongest moving forces of human life, but money is, in many cases, desired in and for itself; the desire to possess it is often stronger than the desire to use it, and goes on increasing when all the desires which point to ends beyond it, to be compassed by it, are falling off. It may, then, be said truly, that money is desired not for the sake of an end, but as part of the end. From being a means to happiness, it has come to be itself a principal ingredient of the individual's conception of happiness.

Truths are known to us in two ways: some are known directly, and of themselves; some through the medium of other truths. The former are the subject of Intuition, or Consciousness; 4 the latter, of Inference.

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

Then are seen the cases, so frequent in this age of the world as almost to form the majority, in which the creed remains as it were outside the mind, incrusting and petrifying it again all other influences addressed to the higher parts of our nature; manifesting its power by not suffering any fresh and living conviction to get in, but itself doing nothing for the mind or heart except standing sentinel over them to keep them vacant

How will the remaining portion of the community like to have the amusements that shall be permitted to them regulated by the religious and moral sentiments of the stricter Calvinists and Methodists? Would they not, with considerable peremptoriness, desire these intrusively pious members of society to mind their own business? This is precisely what should be said to every government and every public, who have the pretension that no person shall enjoy any pleasure which they think wrong.

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

Az igazság többet nyer azoknak a tévedéseivel, akik kellő felkészülés után a maguk fejével gondolkodnak, mint azoknak az igaz vélekedéseivel, akik csupán azért vélekednek így, mert nem hajlandók magukat gondolkodással gyötörni.

Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them.

He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation.

Men do not desire merely to be rich, but to be richer than other men.

From the essay 'On Social Freedom' (1907). Mill's authorship is disputed; modern scholarship (Rees 1956; Humanities 2023) credits Ebenezer R. Edger, not Mill.