In this age, the man who dares to think for himself and to act independently does a service to his race.
- Topic: Courage, Society, Thinking
- 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.
Actions are right in proportion as they promote happiness, wrong as the produce the reverse.
It is not because men's desires are strong that they act ill; it is because their consciences are weak.
I am not aware that any community has a right to force another to be civilized.
He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation.
The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.
To do as one would be done by, and to love one's neighbor as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality.
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No man will ever bring out the Presidency the reputation which carries him into it.
Moral courage is the most valuable and usually the most absent characteristics in men.
Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.
The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.
Great is he, who conquers the frightful. Sublime is he, who, while succumbing to it, fears it not.
There are two ways to conquer and enslave a country. One is by the sword. The other is by debt.
If the soul is left in darkness sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.
There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.
The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.
That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.
...the individual ceases to be himself; he adopts entirely the kind of personality offered to him by cultural patterns; and he therefore becomes exactly as all others are and as they expect him to be...The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more. But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self.
Not in the clamor of the crowded street, not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng, but in ourselves, are triumph and defeat.
Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within solitude of his own heart.
Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things.
When whole races and peoples conspire to propagate gigantic mute lies in the interest of tyrannies and shams, why should we care anything about the trifling lies told by individuals?
Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever.
It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster.
What exactly is your 'fair share' of what 'someone else' has worked for?
Drink does not drown care, but waters it, and makes it grow faster.
It is a very great thing to be able to think as you like; but, after all, an important question remains: what you think.
There are only two kinds of people, those who accept dogmas and know it, and those who accept dogmas and don't know it.
Be the witness of your thoughts. You are what observes, not what you observe.
If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.
