John Stuart Mill

One person with a belief is equal to ninety-nine who have only interests.

Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative.

A person may cause evil to others, not only by his actions, but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury.

The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius mental vigor and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.

That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.

Men might as well be imprisoned as excluded from the means of earning their bread.

The general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind.

As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind human beings must be willing when need is to do battle for the one against the other.

As for charity it is a matter in which the immediate effect on the persons directly concerned and the ultimate consequence to the general good are apt to be at complete war with one another.

Life has a certain flavor for those who have fought and risked all that the sheltered and protected can never experience.

He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.

The individual is not accountable to society for his actions in so far as these concern the interests of no person but himself.

Originality is the one thing which unoriginal minds cannot feel the use of.

Unquestionably it is possible to do without happiness, it is done involuntarily by nineteen-twentieths of mankind.

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.

What distinguishes the majority of men from the few is their inability to act according to their beliefs.

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.

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

In all intellectual debates both sides tend to be correct in what they affirm and wrong in what they deny.

All political revolutions not affected by foreign conquest originate in moral revolutions. The subversion of established institutions is merely one consequence of the previous subversion of established opinions.