John Stuart Mill Quotes

Is there anything in the existing condition that makes the duty of Congress to put the liberty of all the people of the United States in jeopardy?... Are we going to take up the question of what a man shall eat and what a man shall drink, and put him under severe penalties if he is eating or drinking something different from what the chemists of the Agricultural Department think desirable?

Libertarians argue that no normal adult has the right to impose choices on other normal adults, except in abnormal circumstances, such as when one person finds another unconscious and administers medical assistance or calls an ambulance.

My thing is personal freedoms: freedoms for the individual to love whom they want, do with what they want. In fact, I want the government out of almost everything.

What libertarians assert is simply that differences among normal adults do not imply different fundamental rights.

The sanctity of a woman's right to control her own destiny is a moral force of its own... I came to realize that the question of choice is to be answered, not by the state, but by the individual.

All I'm for is the liberty of the individual.

As soon as we surrender the principle that the state should not interfere in any questions touching on the individuals mode of life, we end by regulating and restricting the latter down to the smallest details.

In the first place, the government ought not to be invested with power to control the affections, any more than the consciences of citizens. A man has at least as good a right to choose his wife, as he has to choose his religion. His taste may not suit his neighbors; but so long as his deportment is correct, they have no right to interfere with his concerns.

I am not in favor of imposing happiness on people. Everyone has a right to his bad wine, to his stupidity, and to his dirty fingernails.

My feeling is that whatever people elect to do, insofar as they don't deny the rights of others, every effort should be made to defend their right to do it.

[People] don't like the government telling them what to do or telling them how to live their lives.

What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free.

My political philosophy as a libertarian says that government has no business intervening in any consensual private behavior. My professional ethic as a thinker and writer, however, says that self-knowledge is our ultimate responsibility

The story of the Western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government 'security,' large numbers of people vote to dump freedom every time - the freedom to make your own decisions about health care, education, property rights, and a ton of other stuff.

The inherent purpose of American government is let people seek their own goals and to encourage them to be responsible on the various adventures they have on their way to those goals, good, bad, and otherwise.

Since no one but you can know what's best for you, government control can't make your life better.

We have to recognize that the freedom of the individual has to be protected not only from the power of the state, but even more so from economic and societal power.

The liberty of the individual is a necessary postulate of human progress.

If we wish to preserve a free society, it is essential that we recognize that the desirability of a particular object is not sufficient justification for the use of coercion.

The Libertarian Party holds that same-sex marriages are an individual issue and that the government has no right to determine with whom a person should have a relationship.

The individual is not only best qualified to provide his own personal defense, he is the only one qualified to do so: and his right to do so is guaranteed by the Constitution.

I believe in less government interference in people's personal lives, including whom to marry, when and whether to bear a child and how to raise kind and compassionate children.

The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

But there is no obvious reason for holding that some normal adults are entitled to make choices for other normal adults, as paternalists of both left and right believe.

I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.