On Liberty Quotes
"The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race."
"He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that."
"The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it."
"A state which dwarfs its men...will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished."
"Liberty lies in the rights of that person whose views you deem most odious."
"The only freedom deserving the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way."
"Human beings owe to each other help to distinguish the better from the worse."
"The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people."
"All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility."
"Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest."
"The same strong susceptibilities which make the personal impulses vivid and powerful, are also the source from whence are generated the most passionate love of virtue, and the sternest self-control."
"The faculties are called into no exercise by doing a thing merely because others do it, no more than by believing a thing only because others believe it."
"The power of compelling others into it, is not only inconsistent with the freedom and development of all the rest, but corrupting to the strong man himself."
"Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric."
"If there were nothing new to be done, would human intellect cease to be necessary?"
"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."
"A person whose desires and impulses are his own—is the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture—is said to have a character."
"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 initiation of all wise or noble things, comes and must come from individuals; generally at first from some one individual."
"If the grounds of an opinion are not conclusive to the person's own reason, his reason cannot be strengthened, but is likely to be weakened by his adopting it."
"The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement."
"The spirit of improvement is not always a spirit of liberty."
"The only unfailing and permanent source of improvement is liberty."
"Custom, in the East, is in all things the final appeal; justice and right mean conformity to custom."
"A people may be progressive for a certain length of time, and then stop: when it ceases to possess individuality."
"Europe is, in my judgment, wholly indebted to [its] plurality of paths for its progressive and many-sided development."
"To individuality should belong the part of life in which it is chiefly the individual that is interested."
"He is the person most interested in his own well-being."
"In all such cases there should be perfect freedom, legal and social, to do the action and stand the consequences."
"In many cases, though individuals may not do the particular thing so well, on the average, as the officers of government, it is nevertheless desirable that it should be done by them."
"This is a principal, though not the sole, recommendation of jury trial."
"These are not questions of liberty, and are connected with that subject only by remote tendencies; but they are questions of development."
"Without these habits and powers, a free constitution can neither be worked nor preserved."
"Government operations tend to be everywhere alike."
"The great evil of adding unnecessarily to [government] power."
"Every function superadded to those already exercised by the government, causes its influence over hopes and fears to be more widely diffused."
"A very different spectacle is exhibited among a people accustomed to transact their own business."
"No bureaucracy can hope to make such a people as this do or undergo anything that they do not like."