“The reasons for legal intervention in favour of children, apply not less strongly to the case of those unfortunate slaves and victims of the most brutal part of mankind, the lower animals.”

— John Stuart Mill , book Principles of Political Economy

Book V, Chapter 11, Section 9
Principles of Political Economy (1848-1871)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Oct. 26, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The reasons for legal intervention in favour of children, apply not less strongly to the case of those unfortunate slav…" by John Stuart Mill?

John Stuart Mill photo

John Stuart Mill 179

British philosopher and political economist 1806–1873

Related quotes

“Men are rather reasoning than reasonable animals, for the most part governed by the impulse of passion.”

Alexander Hamilton (1757–1804) Founding Father of the United States

Letter (16 April 1802)

“Buonaparte's foreign policy was force and menace, aided by fraud and corruption. If the fraud was discovered, force and menace succeeded; and in most cases the unfortunate victim did not dare to avow that he perceived the fraud.”

Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington (1769–1852) British soldier and statesman

Letter to John Wilson Croker (29 December 1835), quoted in L. J. Jennings (ed.), The Croker Papers: The Correspondence and Diaries of the Late Right Honourable John Wilson Croker, LL.D., F.R.S., Secretary to the Admiralty from 1809 to 1830, Vol. II (1884), p. 288

“Counsel are frequently induced, and they are justified in taking the most favourable view of their clients' case; and it is not fair to pass over any piece of evidence they find difficult to deal with, provided they cite, fairly and correctly, those parts of the evidence they comment upon.”

Lloyd Kenyon, 1st Baron Kenyon (1732–1802) British Baron

Trial of the Earl of Thanet, and others (1799), 27 How. St. Tr. 940.

“In some states, the victims of criminal activities may apply to the state for damages. This most unfortunate policy is a counter-productive procedure which encourages crime rather than deters it. It encourages a bandit to say to his victim, "Don't worry, mister. You'll get it all back from the state."”

W. Cleon Skousen (1913–2006) ex FBI agent, conservative United States author and faith-based political theorist

The 5,000 Year Leap (1981)

“A government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

“If the slavery of the parents be unjust, much more is their children's; if the parents were justly slaves, yet the children are born free; this is the natural, perfect right of all mankind; they are nothing but a just recompense to those who bring them up: And as much less is commonly spent on them than others, they have a right, in justice, to be proportionably sooner free.”

Thomas Paine (1737–1809) English and American political activist

1770s, African Slavery in America (March 1775)

“The Grecians and Romans were strongly possessed of the spirit of liberty but not the principle, for at the time that they were determined not to be slaves themselves, they employed their power to enslave the rest of mankind.”

Thomas Paine (1737–1809) English and American political activist

The Crisis No. V (1778)
1770s, The American Crisis (1776–1783)

“The faculty by which man is differentiated from the lower animals is his reasoning power. But the devout believer renounces reason, refuses to explain the things which surround him, the innumerable natural phenomena, because his religious faith is enough for him. The brain loses the habit of thinking; and this religious sottishness hurls mankind back into animalism.”

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…

1900s, God Does Not Exist (1904)

“It is often said, as an excuse for the slaughter of animals, that it is better for them to live and to be butchered than not to live at all. … In fact, if we once admit that it is an advantage to an animal to be brought into the world, there is hardly any treatment that cannot be justified by the supposed terms of such a contract. Also, the argument must apply to mankind. It has, in fact, been the plea of the slave-breeder; and it is logically just as good an excuse for slave-holding as for flesh-eating. It would justify parents in almost any treatment of their children, who owe them, for the great boon of life, a debt of gratitude which no subsequent services can repay. We could hardly deny the same merit to cannibals, if they were to breed their human victims for the table, as the early Peruvians are said to have done.”

Henry Stephens Salt (1851–1939) British activist

The Humanities of Diet

“They could resign themselves to the Republic no less than the big industrialists, who did not favour the various abortive revolts and did not, for the most part, encourage National-Socialism.”

Konrad Heiden (1901–1966) German journalist and historian

Source: Hitler: A Biography (1936), p. 58

Related topics