John Stuart Mill citations (191 citations, Page 3)

John Stuart Mill: 191 citations 0 J'aime

John Stuart Mill citations célèbres

“Mais ce qu'il y a de particulièrement néfaste à imposer silence à l'expression d'une opinion, c'est que cela revient à voler l'humanité : tant la postérité que la génération présente, les détracteurs de cette opinion davantage encore que ses détenteurs. Si l'opinion est juste, on les prive de l'occasion d'échanger l'erreur pour la vérité; si elle est fausse, ils perdent un bénéfice presque aussi considérable : une perception plus claire et une impression plus vive de la vérité que produit sa confrontation avec l'erreur.”

John Stuart Mill livre De la liberté

But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
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De la liberté

“Celui qui ne connaît que ses propres arguments connaît mal sa cause.”

John Stuart Mill livre De la liberté

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.
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De la liberté

“[…] la méthode dialectique n'est rien d'autre qu'une pensée scientifique dans des conditions où, pour paraphraser Marx, les méthodes d'investigation expérimentale et empirique doivent laisser la place à la force de l'abstraction, à des postulats théoriques et à des déductions appliquées à une interconnexion changeante et complexe de relation et de processus. John Stuart Mill avait déjà tenté de décrire une telle méthode, mais Dieu sait pourquoi on ne l'a jamais rapprochée à la dialectique. En Russie, Tchernychevski, qui avait traduit Mill en russe, l'avait également évoquée.”

John Stuart Mill

“L'utilité même d'une opinion est affaire d'opinion.”

John Stuart Mill livre De la liberté

The usefulness of an opinion is itself matter of opinion.
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De la liberté

“L’histoire nous montre constamment la vérité réduite au silence par la persécution; si elle n’est pas supprimée à tout jamais, elle peut être reculée pour des siècles.”

John Stuart Mill livre De la liberté

History teems with instances of truth put down by persecution. If not suppressed forever, it may be thrown back for centuries.
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De la liberté

“Le génie ne peut respirer librement que dans une atmosphère de liberté.”

John Stuart Mill livre De la liberté

Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom.
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De la liberté

“Que si peu de gens osent maintenant être excentriques, voilà qui révèle le principal danger de notre époque.”

John Stuart Mill livre De la liberté

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

“De tous les stratagèmes utilisés pour éviter de prendre en considération l’influence que la société et la morale exercent sur l'esprit humain, le plus lâche est celui qui attribue la diversité des comportements et des personnalités à des différences naturelles innées.”

John Stuart Mill

Racisme

“Sur une plaine toute plate un petit tas de terre semble une colline; on jugera de la platitude de notre bourgeoisie actuelle en prenant le calibre de ses « grands esprits.»”

John Stuart Mill

À propos de John Stuart Mill.

Citations sur les hommes et les garçons de John Stuart Mill

“Ce principe veut que les hommes ne soient autorisés, individuellement ou collectivement, à entraver la liberté d'action de quiconque que pour assurer leur propre protection. La seule raison légitime que puisse avoir une communauté pour user de la force contre un de ses membres est de l'empêcher de nuire aux autres.”

John Stuart Mill livre De la liberté

That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.
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De la liberté

“La valeur d'un État, à la longue, c'est la valeur des individus qui le composent; et un État qui sacrifie les intérêts de leur élévation intellectuelle à un peu plus d'art administratif - ou à l'apparence qu'en donne la pratique - dans le détail des affaires; un État qui rapetisse les hommes pour en faire des instruments dociles entre ses mains, même en vue de bienfaits, un tel État s'apercevra qu'avec de petits hommes; rien de grand ne saurait s'accomplir, et que la perfection de la machine à laquelle il a tout sacrifié n'aboutit finalement à rien, faute de cette puissance vitale qu'il lui a plu de proscrire pour faciliter le jeu de la machine.”

John Stuart Mill livre De la liberté

The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it; and a State which postpones the interests of their mental expansion and elevation, to a little more of administrative skill, or that semblance of it which practice gives, in the details of business; a State, which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes, will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish.
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De la liberté

“Contraindre quiconque pour son propre bien, physique ou moral, ne constitue pas une justification suffisante. Un homme ne peut pas être légitimement contraint d'agir ou de s'abstenir sous prétexte que ce serait meilleur pour lui, que cela le rendrait plus heureux ou que, dans l'opinion des autres, agir ainsi serait sage ou même juste.”

John Stuart Mill livre De la liberté

His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right.
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De la liberté

John Stuart Mill: Citations en anglais

“For my own part, not believing in universal selfishness, I have no difficulty in admitting that Communism would even now be practicable among the elite of mankind, and may become so among the rest.”

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John Stuart Mill

On Representative Government (1861)

“That the human mind has a certain order of possible progress, in which some things must precede others, an order which governments and public instructors can modify to some, but not to an unlimited extent: That all questions of political institutions are relative, not absolute, and that different stages of human progress not only will have, but ought to have, different institutions: That government is always either in the hands, or passing into the hands, of whatever is the strongest power in society, and that what this power is, does not depend on institutions, but institutions on it: That any general theory or philosophy of politics supposes a previous theory of human progress, and that this is the same thing with a philosophy of history.”

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John Stuart Mill livre Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873)
Source: https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/162/mode/1up p. 162

“Two very different ideas are usually confounded under the name democracy. The pure idea of democracy, according to its definition, is the government of the whole people by the whole people, equally represented. Democracy, as commonly conceived and hitherto practiced, is the government of the whole people by a mere majority of the people exclusively represented. The former is synonymous with the equality of all citizens; the latter, strangely confounded with it, is a government of privilege in favor of the numerical majority, who alone possess practically any voice in the state. This is the inevitable consequence of the manner in which the votes are now taken, to the complete disfranchisement of minorities.”

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John Stuart Mill

Source: On Representative Government (1861), Ch. VII: Of True and False Democracy; Representation of All, and Representation of the Majority only (p. 247)

“All students of man and society who possess that first requisite for so difficult a study, a due sense of it’s difficulties, are aware that the besetting danger is not so much of embracing falsehood for true, as of mistaking part of the truth for the whole.”

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John Stuart Mill

“Coleridge”. London and Westminster Review. (March 1840).

“of the evils most liable to attend on any sort of early proficiency, and which often fatally blights its promise, my father most anxiously guarded against. This was self-conceit. He kept me, with extreme vigilance, out of the way of hearing myself praised, or of being led to make self-flattering comparisons between myself and others. From his own intercourse with me I could derive none but a very humble opinion of myself; and the standard of comparison he always held up to me, was not what other people did, but what a man could and ought to do. He completely succeeded in preserving me from the sort of influences he so much dreaded. I was not at all aware that my attainments were anything unusual at my age.”

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John Stuart Mill livre Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873)

https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/32/mode/1up pp. 32–33

“I may observe by the way that this book cured me of my sectarian follies. The two or three pages beginning "Il regardait toute secte comme nuisible," and explaining why Turgot always kept himself perfectly distinct from the Encyclopedists, sank deeply into my mind. I left off designating myself and others as Utilitarians, and by the pronoun "we" or any other collective designation, I ceased to affiche, sectarianism. My real inward sectarianism I did not get rid of till later, and much more gradually.”

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John Stuart Mill livre Autobiography

Autobiography (1873)

“Whenever the general disposition of the people is such, that each individual regards those only of his interests which are selfish, and does not dwell on, or concern himself for, his share of the general interest, in such a state of things, good government is impossible.”

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John Stuart Mill

Source: On Representative Government (1861), Ch. II: The Criterion of a Good Form of Government (p. 167)

“unbelievers (so called) as well as of believers, there are many species, including almost every variety of moral type. But the best among them, as no one who has had opportunities of really knowing them will hesitate to affirm (believers rarely have that opportunity), are more genuinely religious, in the best sense of the word religion, than those who exclusively arrogate to themselves the title.”

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John Stuart Mill livre Autobiography

Source: https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/45/mode/1up pp. 45–46

“Most boys or youths who have had much knowledge drilled into them, have their mental capacities not strengthened, but overlaid by it. They are crammed with mere facts, and with the opinions and phrases of other people, and these are accepted as a substitute for the power to form opinions of their own. And thus, the sons of eminent fathers, who have spared no pains in their education, so often grow up mere parroters of what they have learnt, incapable of using their minds except in the furrows traced for them.”

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John Stuart Mill livre Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873), Ch. 1: Childhood and Early Education (pp. 21-22)

“It is in this way that all my books have been composed. They were always written at least twice over; a first draft of the entire work was completed to the very end of the subject, then the whole begun again de novo; but incorporating, in the second writing, all sentences and parts of sentences of the old draft, which appeared as suitable to my purpose as anything which I could write in lieu of them. I have found great advantages in this system of double redaction. It combines, better than any other mode of composition, the freshness and vigour of the first conception, with the superior precision and completeness resulting from prolonged thought. In my own case, moreover, I have found that the patience necessary for a careful elaboration of the details of composition and expression, costs much less effort after the entire subject has been once gone through, and the substance of all that I find to say has in some manner, however imperfect, been got upon paper.”

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John Stuart Mill livre Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873)
Source: https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/222/mode/1up p. 222

“Whatever we may think or affect to think of the present age, we cannot get out of it; we must suffer with its sufferings, and enjoy with its enjoyments; we must share in its lot, and, to be either useful or at ease, we must even partake its character.”

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John Stuart Mill

"The Spirit of the Age, I", Examiner (9 January 1831), p. 20 Full text online http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/256/50650

“Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.”

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John Stuart Mill livre De la liberté

Source: On Liberty (1859), Ch. III: Of Individuality, As One of the Elements of Well-Being

“People are not aware how entirely, in former ages, the law of superior strength was the rule of life; how publicly and openly it was avowed, I do not say cynically or shamelessly — for these words imply a feeling that there was something in it to be ashamed of, and no such notion could find a place in the faculties of any person in those ages, except a philosopher or a saint.”

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John Stuart Mill The Subjection of Women

Source: The Subjection of Women (1869), Ch. 1

“A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither.”

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John Stuart Mill

Also attributed to Thomas Jefferson, this is a modern paraphrase of a statement of Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Misattributed

“The Benthamic standard of "the greatest happiness" was that which I had always been taught to apply; I was even familiar with an abstract discussion of it, forming an episode in an unpublished dialogue on Government, written by my father on the Platonic model. Yet in the first pages of Bentham it burst upon me with all the force of novelty. What thus impressed me was the chapter in which Bentham passed judgment on the common modes of reasoning in morals and legislation, deduced from phrases like "the law of nature," "right reason," "the moral sense," "natural rectitude," and the like, and characterized them as dogmatism in disguise, imposing its sentiments upon others under cover of sounding expressions which convey no reason for the sentiment, but set up the sentiment as its own reason. It had not struck me before, that Bentham's principle put an end to all this. The feeling rushed upon me, that all previous moralists were superseded, and that here indeed was the commencement of a new era in thought.”

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John Stuart Mill livre Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873), Ch. 3: Last Stage of Education and First of Self-Education (pp. 45-46)

“I frequently asked myself, if I could, or if I was bound to go on living, when life must be passed in this manner.”

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John Stuart Mill livre Autobiography

Autobiography (1873)

“There is room in the world, no doubt, and even in old countries, for a great increase of population, supposing the arts of life to go on improving, and capital to increase. But even if innocuous, I confess I see very little reason for desiring it. The density of population necessary to enable mankind to obtain, in the greatest degree, all the advantages both of co-operation and of social intercourse, has, in all the most populous countries, been attained. If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger but not a better or a happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it..”

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John Stuart Mill livre Principles of Political Economy

Principles of Political Economy (1848), Book IV, Chapter VI, §3, p. 516

“Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of the representative government, cannot exist.”

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John Stuart Mill

Source: On Representative Government (1861), Ch. XVI: Of Nationality, As Connected with Representative Government (p. 382)

“Since reasoning, or inference, the principal subject of logic, is an operation which usually takes place by means of words, and in complicated cases can take place in no other way: those who have not a thorough insight into both the signification and purpose of words, will be under chances, amounting almost to certainty, of reasoning or inferring incorrectly.”

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John Stuart Mill livre A System of Logic

Source: A System of Logic (1843), p. 11: Cited in Gaines (1976) "Foundations of fuzzy reasoning" in: International Journal of Man-Machine Studies 8(6), p. 623

“When we consider the positive evil caused to the disqualified half of the human race by their disqualification — first in the loss of the most inspiriting and elevating kind of personal enjoyment, and next in the weariness, disappointment, and profound dissatisfaction with life, which are so often the substitute for it; one feels that among all the lessons which men require for carrying on the struggle against the inevitable imperfections of their lot on earth, there is no lesson which they more need, than not to add to the evils which nature inflicts, by their jealous and prejudiced restrictions on one another. Their vain fears only substitute other and worse evils for those which they are idly apprehensive of: while every restraint on the freedom of conduct of any of their human fellow-creatures (otherwise than by making them responsible for any evil actually caused by it), dries up pro tanto the principal fountain of human happiness, and leaves the species less rich, to an inappreciable degree, in all that makes life valuable to the individual human being.”

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John Stuart Mill The Subjection of Women

Source: The Subjection of Women (1869), Ch. 4

“Experience has taught me that those who give their time to the absorbing claims of what is called society, not having leisure to keep up a large acquaintance with the organs of opinion, remain much more ignorant of the general state either of the public mind, or of the active and instructed part of it, than a recluse who reads the newspapers need be.”

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John Stuart Mill livre Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873), Ch. 7: General View of the Remainder of My Life (p. 184)

“As there were black swans, though civilized people had existed for three thousand years on the earth without meeting with them…The uniform experience, therefore, of the inhabitants of the known world, agreeing in a common result, without one known instance of deviation from that result, is not always sufficient to establish a general conclusion.”

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John Stuart Mill livre A System of Logic

A System of Logic (1843)

“Since the state must necessarily provide subsistence for the criminal poor while undergoing punishment, not to do the same for the poor who have not offended is to give a premium on crime.”

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John Stuart Mill livre Principles of Political Economy

Principles of Political Economy (1848), Book V, Chapter XI, §13

“We need not suppose that when power resides in an exclusive class, that class will knowingly and deliberately sacrifice the other classes to themselves: it suffices that, in the absence of its natural defenders, the interest of the excluded is always in danger of being overlooked: and, when looked at, is seen with very different eyes from those of the persons whom it directly concerns.”

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John Stuart Mill

Source: On Representative Government (1861), Ch. III: The Ideally Best Polity

“Human beings have faculties more elevated than the animal appetites, and when once made conscious of them, do not regard anything as happiness which does not include their gratification. I do not, indeed, consider the Epicureans to have been by any means faultless in drawing out their scheme of consequences from the utilitarian principle. To do this in any sufficient manner, many Stoic, as well as Christian elements require to be included. But there is no known Epicurean theory of life which does not assign to the pleasures of the intellect, of the feelings and imagination, and of the moral sentiments, a much higher value as pleasures than to those of mere sensation.”

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John Stuart Mill livre Utilitarianism

Source: Utilitarianism (1861), Ch. 2

“The dissatisfaction with life and the world, felt more or less in the present state of society and intellect by every discerning and highly conscientious mind, gave in his case a rather melancholy tinge to the character, very natural to those whose passive moral susceptibilities are more than proportioned to their active energies. For it must be said, that the strength of will of which his manner seemed to give such strong assurance, expended itself principally in manner. With great zeal for human improvement, a strong sense of duty and capacities and acquirements the extent of which is proved by the writings he has left, he hardly ever completed any intellectual task of magnitude. He had so high a standard of what ought to be done, so exaggerated a sense of deficiencies in his own performances, and was so unable to content himself with the amount of elaboration sufficient for the occasion and the purpose, that he not only spoilt much of his work for ordinary use by over-labouring it, but spent so much time and exertion in superfluous study and thought, that when his task ought to have been completed, he had generally worked himself into an illness, without having half finished what he undertook. From this mental infirmity (of which he is not the sole example among the accomplished and able men whom I have known), combined with liability to frequent attacks of disabling though not dangerous ill-health, he accomplished, through life, little in comparison with what he seemed capable of;”

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John Stuart Mill livre Autobiography

Source: https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/74/mode/1up pp. 74-75

“but the speaker with whom I was most struck, though I dissented from nearly every word he said, was Thirlwall, the historian, since Bishop of St. David's, then a Chancery barrister, unknown except by a high reputation for eloquence acquired at the Cambridge Union before the era of Austin and Macaulay. His speech was in answer to one of mine. Before he had uttered ten sentences, I set him down as the best speaker I had ever heard, and I have never since heard any one whom I placed above him.”

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John Stuart Mill livre Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873)
Source: https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/125/mode/1up p. 125

“Most boys or youths who have had much knowledge drilled into them, have their mental capacities not strengthened, but over-laid by it. They are crammed with mere facts, and with the opinions or phrases of other people, and these are accepted as a substitute for the power to form opinions of their own: and thus the sons of eminent fathers, who have spared no pains in their education, so often grow up mere parroters of what they have learnt, incapable of using their minds except in the furrows traced for them. Mine, however, was not an education of cram. My father never permitted anything which I learnt to degenerate into a mere exercise of memory. He strove to make the understanding not only go along with every step of the teaching, but, if possible, precede it. Anything which could be found out by thinking I never was told, until I had exhausted my efforts to find it out for myself.”

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John Stuart Mill livre Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873)

https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/31/mode/1up p. 31

“A pupil from whom nothing is ever demanded which he cannot do never does all he can.”

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John Stuart Mill livre Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873), Ch. 1: Childhood and Early Education (p. 32 http://archive.org/stream/autobiographymil00milluoft#page/32/mode/2up/search/%22a+pupil+from+whom+nothing+is+ever+demanded+which+he+cannot+do+never+does+all+he+can%22)