UPSC Express

​John Stuart  Mill

One person with a belief is equal to a force of ninety-nine who have only interests.

A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury.

Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.

I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than in attempting to satisfy them.

All good things which exist are the fruits of originality.

He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.

There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home.

That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.

A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.

Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so.

Originality is the one thing which unoriginal minds cannot feel the use of.

The disease which inflicts bureaucracy and what they usually die from is routine.

It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being.

Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing .

We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.

The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.

Life has a certain flavor for those who have fought and risked all that the sheltered and protected can never experience.

Popular opinions, on subjects not palpable to sense, are often true, but seldom or never the whole truth.

The duty of man is the same in respect to his own nature as in respect to the nature of all other things, namely not to follow it but to amend it.

The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement.