35 quotes
British philosopher and political economist (1806–1873)
“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.”
"He who let's 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"
on Philosophy
"I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than in attempting to satisfy them."
on Happiness
"Unquestionably it is possible to do without happiness it is done involuntarily by nineteen-twentieths of mankind."
"I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires rather than in attempting to satisfy them."
"Life has a certain flavor for those who have fought and risked all that the sheltered and protected can never experience."
on Life
"Language is the light of the mind."
on Language
"The beliefs which we have the most warrant for have no safeguard, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded."
on Truth
"The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited, he must not make himself a nuisance to other people."
on Freedom
"We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still."
on Free Speech
"[T]he source of everything respectable in man either as an intellectual or as a moral being namely, that his errors are corrigible."
"Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing."
on Activism
"Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post as soon as there is no enemy in the field."
on Education
"We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion and if we were sure stifling it would be an evil still."
"The despotism of custom is everywhere standing up to human advancement."
on Society
"Ask yourself whether you are happy and you will cease to be so."
"The worth of a state in the long run is the worth of the individuals composing it."
"The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited he must not make himself a nuisance to other people."
"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."
"Unquestionably, it is possible to do without happiness; it is done involuntarily by nineteen-twentieths of mankind."
"The most cogent reason for restricting the interference of government is the great evil of adding unnecessarily to its power."
on Government
