John Stuart Mill Quotes

A truly free society is based on a vision of respect for people and what they value.

In the East, the main object is to have a well-ordered society so that everybody can have maximum enjoyment of his freedoms. This freedom can only exist in an ordered state and not in a natural state of contention and anarchy.

Man should not be in the service of society, society should be in the service of man. When man is in the service of society, you have a monster state, and that's what is threatening the world at this minute.

The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed.

We need not concern ourselves much about rights of property if we faithfully observe the rights of persons.

Liberty exists in proportion to wholesome restraint; the more restraint on others to keep off from us, the more liberty we have.

The laws would not prevent each man from living according to his inclination, unless individuals harmed each other; for envy creates the beginning of strife.

At the heart of that western freedom and democracy is the belief that the individual man...is the touchstone of value, and all society, all groups, and states, exist for that person's benefit. Therefore the enlargement of liberty for individual human beings must be the supreme goal and the abiding practice of any western society.

Even if drugs are fully as destructive as they are usually claimed to be, it is morally wrong and demonstrably more destructive for government to deprive people of their unalienable, individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right to make an utter mess of their own lives. Since human beings are inclined to learn more from the mistakes they make, rather than from their triumphs, the right to fail, for individuals and groups alike, may be even more important than the right to succeed, and it must be fiercely protected at almost any cost.

Every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.

We can have peace and brotherly love by accepting our responsibility to preserve freedom.

A man, even if seriously sick or prevented in the exercise of its higher functions, is and will be always a man ... [he] will never become a 'vegetable' or an 'animal,'" the Pope said. "The intrinsic value and personal dignity of every human being does not change depending on their circumstances.

In the final analysis, true justice is not a matter of courts and law books, but of a commitment in each of us to liberty and mutual respect.

Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.

When government does its job properly people are free to do theirs.

Little more can reasonably be aimed at with respect to the people at large than to have them properly armed.

There are multitudes of persons whose idea of liberty is the right to do what they please, instead of the right of doing that which is lawful and best.

In ten phrases, the ten commandments express the essential of life. And these three words--liberty, equality, and fraternity--do just as much. Millions of people have died for those ideals.

Rand Paul and Chris Christie both said vaccinations should be a choice, not a government mandate. Because when have Republicans ever told people what they could do with their own bodies?

The belief in potential human virtue underlies the whole idea of the Bill of Rights; the document is a very tough guardian of that belief.

Liberty begets license.

Let every man be free to act from his own conscience; but let him remember that other people have consciences too; and let not his liberty be so expansive that in its indulgence it jars and crashes against the liberty of others.

The Second Amendment is in the Constitution to help citizens protect themselves from people like Senator Dianne Feinstein who would come along, and if they could determine what words you can and cannot say, where and where you can't say them. The Constitution is there to protect you from mayors like Mike Doomberg who wants to tell you how big your beverage can be.

The people of every country are the only safe guardians of their own rights.

Every time something really bad happens, people cry out for safety, and the government answers by taking rights away from good people