Quote

The strongest of all arguments against the interference of the public with purely personal conduct, is that when it does interfere, the odds are that it interferes wrongly, and in the wrong place.

John Stuart Mill

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

John Stuart Mill
Age: 67 †
Born: 1806
Born: January 1
Died: 1873
Died: January 1
Autobiographer
Clerk
Economist
Egalitarianism
Philosopher
Politician
Suffragist
Writer
Islington
J. S. Mill
Strongest
Interferes
Argument
Wrongly
Personal
Interference
Public
Purely
Wrong
Arguments
Place
Interfere
Doe
Conduct
Odds

More quotes by John Stuart Mill

Image
Belief, thus, in the supernatural, great as are the services which it rendered in the early stages of human development, cannot be considered to be any longer required, either for enabling us to know what is right and wrong in social morality, or for supplying us with motives to do right and to abstain from wrong.
John Stuart Mill
Image
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.
John Stuart Mill
Image
He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.
John Stuart Mill
Image
All desirable things... are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as a means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain.
John Stuart Mill
Image
A [psychological] difficulty is not an impossibility.
John Stuart Mill
Image
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.
John Stuart Mill
Image
The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.
John Stuart Mill
Image
The test of real and vigorous thinking, the thinking which ascertains truths instead of dreaming dreams, is successful application to practice.
John Stuart Mill
Image
Persons of genius are, ex vi termini, more individual than any other people - less capable, consequently, of fitting themselves, without hurtful compression, into any of the small number of moulds which society provides in order to save its members the trouble of forming their character.
John Stuart Mill
Image
Every man who says frankly and fully what he thinks is so far doing a public service. We should be grateful to him for attacking most unsparingly our most cherished opinions.
John Stuart Mill
Image
The legal subordination of one sex to another - is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement and that it ought to be replaced by a system of perfect equality, admitting no power and privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.
John Stuart Mill
Image
The true virtue of human beings is fitness to live together as equals claiming nothing for themselves but what they as freely concede to everyone else regarding command of any kind as an exceptional neccessity, and in all cases a temporary one.
John Stuart Mill
Image
In early times, the great majority of the male sex were slaves, as well as the whole of the female. And many ages elapsed, some of them ages of high cultivation, before any thinker was bold enough to question the rightfulness, and the absolute social necessity, either of the one slavery or of the other.
John Stuart Mill
Image
Every established fact which is too bad to admit of any other defence is always presented to us as an injunction of religion.
John Stuart Mill
Image
Was there ever any domination that did not appear natural to those who possessed it?
John Stuart Mill
Image
The habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings.
John Stuart Mill
Image
The cause, then, philosophically speaking, is the sum total of the conditions, positive and negative, taken together the whole of the contingencies of every description, which being realized, the consequent invariably follows.
John Stuart Mill
Image
All errors which a man is likely to commit against advice are far outweighed by the evil of allowing others to constrain him for his good.
John Stuart Mill
Image
He who lets the world choose his plan of life for him has need of no other faculty than that of ape-like imitation.
John Stuart Mill
Image
Is there any moral enormity which might not be justified by imitation of such a Deity?
John Stuart Mill