Of two pleasures, if there be one which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure.
John Stuart Mill | experience Read More »
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 | experience Read More »
Life has a certain flavor for those who have fought and risked all that the sheltered and protected can never experience.
John Stuart Mill | experience Read More »
There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home.
John Stuart Mill | experience Read More »
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.
John Stuart Mill | courage Read More »
Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character had abounded and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and courage which it contained.
John Stuart Mill | courage Read More »
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 a war, is much worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice, — is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. 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.
Quote from John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy Read More »
I have a hundred times heard him say, that all ages and nations have represented their gods as wicked, in a constantly increasing progression; that mankind have gone on adding trait after trait till they reached the most perfect conception of wickedness which the human mind could devise, and have called this God, and prostrated themselves before it.
Quote from John Stuart Mill, Autobiography Read More »
There are no means of finding what either one person or many can do, but by trying – and no means by which anyone else can discover for them what it is for their happiness to do or leave undone
Quote from John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women Read More »