John Stuart Mill Quotes

I do not believe that the Great Society is the ordered, changeless, and sterile battalion of ants.

I'm not any kind of social reformer.

Man is as the Lord made him. But we can change our institutions.

Perhaps a revolution can overthrow autocratic despotism and profiteering or power-grabbing oppression, but it can never truly reform a manner of thinking; instead, new prejudices, just like the old ones they replace, will serve as a leash for the great unthinking mass.

The eager and often inconsiderate appeals of reformers and revolutionists are indispensable to counterbalance the inertia and fossilism marking so large a part of human institutions.

It is the reformer who is anxious for the reform, and not society, from which he should expect nothing better than opposition, abhorrence and even mortal persecution.

There are people into whose heads it never enters to conceive of any better state of society than that which now exists.

A man that'd expict to thrain lobsters to fly in a year is called a loonytic; but a man that thinks men can be tur-rned into angels by an iliction is called a rayformer an' remains at large.

I think that the major message of my life and what I hope to be remembered for is someone who managed to change the social sexual values of his time absolutely.

... reform the environment and not man; being absolutely confident that if you give man the right environment, he will behave favorably.

None more deceive themselves than they who think their religion is true and genuine, thought it refines not their spirits and reforms not their lives.

It is easier to show the disorder that must accompany reform than the order that should follow it.

It has never mattered to me that thirty million people might think I'm wrong. The number of people who thought Hitler was right did not make him right... Why do you necessarily have to be wrong just because a few million people think you are?

The kind of group mentality that we had lived under since the Second World War is starting to erupt, and the craving for individualism is now much stronger. It's not as taboo anymore, as it was when I was younger.

The born-yesterday French-besotted faddists, addicted sniffers of wet printer's ink, think they're starting on the ground floor; so they're condemned to another hundred years of trial and error. The rest of us can safely ignore them.

I'm one of those people that think Thomas Edison and the light bulb changed the world more than Karl Marx ever did.

I think we can make a contribution to their [Saudi Arabia] thinking as they decide how they should deal with the economic and social challenges that they are facing.

The world is always childish, and with each new gewgaw of a revolution or new constitution that it finds, thinks it shall never cry any more.

I can think of few important movements for reform in which success was won by any method other than that of an energetic minority presenting the indifferent majority with a fait accompli, which was then accepted.

I don't really care if people like a character ornot; I think in life we don't always like everybody. But you haveto be able to understand them.

I don't think it's necessary to feel guilty. Because I know that I'm still doing the work that is going to help more sisters and brothers to challenge the whole criminal justice system, and I'm trying to use whatever knowledge I was able to acquire to continue to do the work in our communities that will move us forward.

Should I abide by the rules until they're changed, or help speed the change by breaking them?

My personal credo as a libertarian conservative: I think all attempts to reform your fellow-citizens or tell them how to live their lives are arrogant and tyrannical. THAT'S why I oppose Leftism. I want people to be free to manage their own lives. Reform is just authoritarianism. People are not playthings for anybody's theories or obsessions.

"What is normal?" really becomes the question. What is normal, and how are we fooled into thinking it's something other than what we're doing at any given time. Every family has either a drug addict or an alcoholic or some sort of dysfunction that the family is dealing with. And I think the grace of this family is that they actually could be that far out there but also be forgiving, and be really human, and be human in front of each other without much shame.

I think that as our country becomes more tolerant as a whole of certain things, hopefully becomes more tolerant, there's a way that certain kinds of bullying will be passe and unacceptable.