John Stuart Mill Quotes

It's absolutely normal that different human beings want to go different ways.

Most actions derive not from your own initiative but from your family circumstances, your education, your calling, and so on. You must therefore give up a little time to performing actions which derive from yourself alone. They need not be important; quite insignificant actions fulfill the same purpose.

Instead of boiling up individuals into the species, I would draw a chalk circle round every individuality, and preach to it to keep within that, and preserve and cultivate its identity.

One creates oneself.

Human beings have an instinct for freedom.

A necessary corollary of giving individuals freedom to choose how to conduct their lives is acceptance of the fact that different individuals will make different choices.

Liberty trains for liberty.

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.

The genius of a free society is that its citizens have wide scope to pursue their own visions of the good without excessive hindrance by their fellow citizens.

Every man is by … natural right, the master of his own thoughts

I have not much faith in "good government." What we need is the development of the individual.

When one has genuinely chosen a course for oneself it cannot be possible to hold another responsible for it.

The strongest reason for giving woman all the opportunities for higher education, for the full development of her faculties, her forces of mind and body... is the solitude and personal responsibility of her own individual life.

I think the principal purpose of education is to allow each of us, when we become adults, to shape our own future.

I believe that all people aspire to be free.

Man is born a tabula rasa; he must learn how to choose the ends that are proper for him and the means that he must adopt to attain them. All this must be done by his reason.

You can't change people.

There's no person I aspire to be. I'm just doing my own thing and seeing what happens - not looking to something and trying to be that.

I want to follow my path.

Every child has a right to its own bent. . . . It has a right to find its own way and go its own way, whether that way seems wise or foolish to others, exactly as an adult has. It has a right to privacy as to its own doings and its own affairs as much as if it were its own father.

My mother understood human nature better and never chided. She knew that a man cannot be saved from his own foolishness or vice by someone else's efforts or protests, but only by the use of his own will.

Our forefathers were not only brave. I believe they were right. I believe that what they meant was that every man born had equal right to grow from scratch by way of his own power unhindered to the highest expression of himself possible to him.

I have one abiding religion-human liberty.

Liberty is the hardest test that one can inflict on a people. To know how to be free is not given equally to all men and all nations.

Give up the idea that by ruling over others you can do any good to them. But you can do just as much as you can in the case of the plant: you can supply the growing seed with the materials for the making up of its body, bringing to it the earth, the water, the air, that it wants. It will take all that it wants by its own nature, it will assimilate and grow by its own nature.