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The sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable, is that people do actually desire it.
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
Evidence
Produce
Possible
Actually
Desire
Anything
People
Desirable
Sole
More quotes by John Stuart Mill
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
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.
John Stuart Mill
The price paid for intellectual pacification is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind.
John Stuart Mill
The guesses which serve to give mental unity and wholeness to a chaos of scattered particulars, are accidents which rarely occur to any minds but those abounding in knowledge and disciplined in intellectual combinations.
John Stuart Mill
What citizens of a free country would listen to any offers of good and skillful administration in return for the abdication of freedom?
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 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.
John Stuart Mill
Lord, enlighten thou our enemies. Sharpen their wits, give acuteness to their perceptions, and consecutiveness and clearness to their reasoning powers: we are in danger from their folly, not from their wisdom their weakness is what fills us with apprehension, not their strength.
John Stuart Mill
Any society which is not improving is deteriorating, and the more so the closer and more familiar it is. Even a really superior man almost always begins to deteriorate when he is habitually king of his company.
John Stuart Mill
A person's taste is as much his own peculiar concern as his opinion or his purse.
John Stuart Mill
The natural tendency of representative government, as of modern civilisation, is towards collective mediocrity: and this tendency is increased by all reductions and extensions of the franchise, their effect being to place the principal power in the hands of classes more and more below the highest level of instruction in the community.
John Stuart Mill
The worth of the state, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing 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
Everything must be free to be written and published without restraint.
John Stuart Mill
Judgement is given to men that they may use it. Because it may be used erroneously, are men to be told that they ought not to use it at all?
John Stuart Mill
Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative.
John Stuart Mill
It must be granted that in every syllogism, considered as an argument to prove the conclusion, there is a petitio principii. When we say, All men are mortal Socrates is a man therefore Socrates is mortal it is unanswerably urged by the adversaries of the syllogistic theory, that the proposition, Socrates is mortal.
John Stuart Mill
He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.
John Stuart Mill
Pleasure and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends.
John Stuart Mill
Popular opinions, on subjects not palpable to sense, are often true, but seldom or never the whole truth.
John Stuart Mill
