C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
John Stuart Mill
A profound conviction raises a man above the feeling of ridicule.
All the good of which humanity is capable is comprised in obedience.
Any society which is not improving is deteriorating, and the more so the closer and more familiar it is. Even a really superior man almost always begins to deteriorate when he is habitually king of his company.
Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.
Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom.
He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.
If it were only that people have diversities of taste, that is reason enough for not attempting to shape them all after one model. But different persons also require different conditions for their spiritual development, and can no more exist healthily in the same moral, than all the varieties of plants can in the same physical, atmosphere and climate.
In politics it is almost a triviality to say that public opinion now rules the world. The only power deserving the name is that of masses and of governments while they make themselves the organ of the tendencies and instincts of masses.
It is not because men’s desires are strong that they act ill; it is because their consciences are weak. There is no natural connection between strong impulses and a weak conscience.
It would not be easy even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete, than to endeavor so to live that Christ would approve our life.
Originality is the one thing which unoriginal minds cannot feel the use of.
Strong impulses are but another name for energy. Energy may be turned to bad uses; but more good may always be made of an energetic nature, than of an indolent and impassive one.
The aim of all intellectual training for the mass of the people should be to cultivate common sense.
The dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes.
The love of power and the love of liberty are in eternal antagonism.
The moral influence of woman over man is almost always salutary.
The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.
The philosophy of reasoning, to be complete, ought to comprise the theory of bad as well as of good reasoning.
The work of a State in the long run is the work of the individuals composing it.