John Stuart Mill Quotes

‎A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body.

My mind is appalled at the thought of a political party having control of all the details that go to make up the sum total of our lives. Think of it for an instant, that the party in power shall have all authority to dictate the kind of books that shall be used in our schools and universities, government officials editing, printing, and circulating our literature, histories, magazines and press, to say nothing of the thousand and one activities of life that a people engage in, in a civilized society.

Government has ever been careful to hold a high hand over the education of the people. They know, better than anyone else, that their power is based almost entirely on the school. Hence, they monopolize it more and more.

Wherever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been found that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery..

For centuries it was never discovered that education was a function of the State, and the State never attempted to educate. But when modern absolutism arose, it laid claim to everything on behalf of the sovereign power....When the revolutionary theory of government began to prevail, and Church and State found that they were educating for opposite ends and in a contradictory spirit, it became necessary to remove children entirely from the influence of religion.

A citizen walking through the airport today is bombarded with 1984-style propaganda messages that are designed to make us fear some amorphous threat and also be suspicious of others. The government designs these messages to make us feel dependent and heavily lorded over in every aspect of our lives. These messages are becoming ever more pervasive, hitting us even in grocery stores when we are shopping.

Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher?

Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.

My father was a teacher, and there were teachers all around, his friends, they were working for the Government and their behaviour was within strictly limited areas.

There are times when the voice of repining is completely drowned out by various louder voices: the voice of government, the voice of taste, the voice of celebrity, the voice of the real world, the voice of fear and force, the voice of gossip.

In the twentieth century one of the most personal relationships to have developed is that of the person and the state. It's become a fact of life that governments have become very intimate with people, most always to their detriment.

Just in general, any government throughout history hasn't really wanted its people to be educated, because then they couldn't control them as easily.

One way to make sure crime doesn't pay would be to let the government run it.

It's no small irony that the government inevitably and invariably ends up promoting precisely that which they would most like to repress.

No matter how much you like your local school teacher, he or she is a government agent.

The government has once again made the right socially acceptable.

Foolish people follow the system, get caught up in media news, what the government wants you to believe and all the higher powers want you to believe, and go down the same path as all the sheep in the cattle market.

Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, masses about central powerhouses. The conflict is no longer between the men, but between the motors that drive men [i.e. governments], and the men who succumb to their own motive forces.

In the larger life of society, the people are made to submit to the orders of those who were originally meant to serve them—the government and its agents.

A national education ought uniformly to be discouraged, on account of its obvious alliance with national government. This is an alliance of a more formidable nature than the old and much contested alliance of church and state.

Any nation wishing to promote national education could not expect to achieve its aims until it took it control of education in its own hands

The worst crime of any type of state is just that it always tries to force the rich diversity of social life into definite forms and adjust it to one particular form

Every central government worships uniformity: uniformity relieves it from inquiry into an infinity of details.

What is new in our time is the increased power of the authorities to enforce their prejudices.

War is the health of the state. It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense.