John Stuart Mill

But as the king of the vultures would be no less bent upon preying on the flock than any of the minor harpies, it was indispensable to be in a perpetual attitude of defence against his beak and claws.

Questions of ultimate ends are not amenable to direct proof.

So long as an opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses in stability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it.

Men did not wake on a summer morning and find them sprung up.

Mill's great merit was that he began the movement to better adapt political economy to society as it actually existed

The reader whom these things do not interest, has only himself to blame if he reads farther, and I do not desire any other indulgence from him than that of bearing in mind that for him these pages were not written.

In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

Whatever can be proved to be good, must be so by being shown to be a means to something admitted to be good without proof.

In the case of women, each individual of the subject-class is in a chronic state of bribery and intimidation combined.

Things left to take care of themselves inevitably decay.

The distinction, then, between Capital and Not-capital, does not lie in the kind of commodities, but in the mind of the capitalist—in his will to employ them for one purpose rather than another

A pupil from whom nothing is ever demanded which he cannot do, never does all he can.

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.

The comparison of the Epicurean life to that of beasts is felt as degrading, precisely because a beast's pleasures do not satisfy a human being's conceptions of happiness.

Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their sentiments.

Let a person have nothing to do for his country, and he will not care for it.

The land subsists, and the land is almost the only thing that subsists. Everything which is produced perishes, and most things very quickly.

I neither estimated myself highly nor lowly: I did not estimate myself at all.

Very few facts are able to tell their own story, without comments to bring out their meaning.

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.