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The spirit of improvement is not always a spirit of liberty, for it may aim at forcing improvements on an unwilling people.
John Stuart Mill
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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
People
Unwilling
Improvement
Aim
Liberty
Freedom
Spirit
May
Improvements
Always
Forcing
More quotes by John Stuart Mill
Trade is a social act. Whoever undertakes to sell any description of any goods to the public, does what affects the interest of other persons, and of society in general and thus his conduct, in principal, comes within the jurisdiction of society.
John Stuart Mill
With equality of experience and of general faculties, a woman usually sees much more than a man of what is immediately before her.
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The perpetual obstacle to human advancement is custom.
John Stuart Mill
The great majority of those who speak of perfectibility as a dream, do so because they feel that it is one which would afford them no pleasure if it were realized.
John Stuart Mill
In the long-run, the best proof of a good character is good actions.
John Stuart Mill
No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought.
John Stuart Mill
It often happens that the universal belief of one age of mankind — a belief from which no one was, nor without an extraordinary effort of genius and courage, could at that time be free — becomes to a subsequent age so palpable an absurdity, that the only difficulty then is to imagine how such a thing can ever have appeared credible.
John Stuart Mill
Landlords grow rich in their sleep without working, risking or economizing. The increase in the value of land, arising as it does from the efforts of an entire community, should belong to the community and not to the individual who might hold title.
John Stuart Mill
The price paid for intellectual pacification is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind.
John Stuart Mill
I confess that I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other's heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human beings
John Stuart Mill
Though it is only in a very imperfect state of the world's arrangements that anyone can best serve the happiness of others by the absolute sacrifice of his own, yet, so long as the world is in that imperfect state, I fully acknowledge that the readiness to make such a sacrifice is the highest virtue which can be found in man.
John Stuart Mill
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
When the people are too much attached to savage independence, to be tolerant of the amount of power to which it is for their good that they should be subject, the state of society is not yet ripe for representative government.
John Stuart Mill
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.
John Stuart Mill
If the universe had a beginning, its beginning, by the very condition of the cases, was supernatural the laws of Nature cannot account for their own origin.
John Stuart Mill
... All ideas need to be heard, because each idea contains one aspect of the truth. By examining that aspect, we add to our own idea of the truth. Even ideas that have no truth in them whatsoever are useful because by disproving them, we add support to our own ideas.
John Stuart Mill
A man of clear ideas errs grievously if he imagines that whatever is seen confusedly does not exist it belongs to him, when he meets with such a thing, to dispel the midst, and fix the outlines of the vague form which is looming through it.
John Stuart Mill
The test of real and vigorous thinking, the thinking which ascertains truths instead of dreaming dreams, is successful application to practice.
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.
John Stuart Mill
Pleasure and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends.
John Stuart Mill
