The worth of a state, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it.
- Topic: Freedom, Liberty
- Location: Yellowstone National Park
- Photo: Jeffrey Benjamin
More Quotes from John Stuart Mill
A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
There is no such thing as absolute certainty, but there is assurance sufficient for the purposes of human life.
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.
Actions are right in proportion as they promote happiness, wrong as the produce the reverse.
The individual is not accountable to society for his actions, insofar as these concern the interests of no person but himself.
More Quotes from Yellowstone National Park
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For friendship, like freedom, must be tended.
You cannot possibly have a broader basis for any government than that which includes all the people, with all their rights in their hands, and with an equal power to maintain their rights.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or the right of the people to peacefully to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. -First Amendment
Freedom is a road seldom traveled by the multitude.
The period is now arrived, in which either they or we must change our sentiments, or one or both must fall.
Fundamentally, there are only to ways of coordinating the economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion — the technique of the army and the modern totalitarian state. The other is voluntary cooperation — the technique of the marketplace.
History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
What light is to the eyes - what air is to the lungs - what love is to the heart, liberty is to the soul of man.
When even one American, who has done nothing wrong, is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth, then all Americans are in peril.
Free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or good or joy worth having.
A free press can of course be good or bad, but, most certainly, without freedom it will never be anything but bad. . . Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better, whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worse.
Our task must be to free ourselves…by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.
Never exceed your rights, and they will soon become unlimited.
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore, send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
No man on earth is truly free. All are slaves of money or necessity. Public opinion or fear of prosecution forces each one, against his conscience, to conform.
Why has government been instituted? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason & justice without constraint.
The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
Freedom ultimately means the right of the other people to do things you don’t approve of.
There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.
If by the mere force of numbers a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might, in a moral point of view, justify revolution—certainly would if such a right were a vital one.
A Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.
If liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly two be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost.
Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of others, you have lost the genius of your own independence and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you.
The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
I rebel; therefore I exist.
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.