John Stuart Mill Quotes

What we really need to be understanding is that all of these things matter and they all stem from the fact that certain people live with power and authority and they want to maintain it.

Every man needs slaves like he needs clean air. To rule is to breathe, is it not? And even the most disenfranchised get to breathe. The lowest on the social scale have their spouses or their children.

The natural course of power is to make the many slaves to the few.

If there is a State, then there is domination, and in turn, there is slavery.

One of the very basic ideas of Post-Modernism is rejection of arbitrary power structures. Different people are sensitive to different kinds of power structures.

Sometimes I think the world is divided into those who have a comfortable relationship with power and those who have a naturally adversarial relationship with power.

Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being.

If you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road.

The people who exercise the power are not always the same people over whom it is exercised.

Whether the institution to be defended is slavery, political absolutism, or the absolutism of the head of a family, we are always expected to judge of it from its best instances; and we are presented with pictures of loving exercise of authority on one side, loving submission to it on the other

Every organism, every human being, must conquer or serve.

However sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some group's greater right to power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, class, religion or all four.

Nature rejects the monarch, not the man; The subject, not the citizen; for kings And subjects, mutual foes, forever play A losing game into each other's hands, Whose stakes are vice and misery. The man Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.

Only powerful people have liberty.

It is not true that equality is a law of nature. Nature has made nothing equal; her sovereign law is subordination and dependence.

How many, even of the better sort, would choose to be slaves to those above them, provided they might exercise an arbitrary and tyrannical rule over all below them?

The concept of power we admire is power over someone else.

Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.

It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.

Proclaim human equality as loudly as you like, Witless will serve his brother.

As equality increases, so does the number of people struggling for predominance.

And this is the Anarchistic definition of the State: the embodiment of the principle of invasion in an individual, or a band of individuals, assuming to act as representatives or masters of the entire people within a given area.

Any society based on domination supports and condones violence.

Hierarchy is is much reviled in the present day.

It is bad to have a servant, but worse to have a master.