Status Updates From Sobre la libertad

‘If he displeases us, we may express our distaste, and we may stand aloof from a person as well as from a thing that displeases us; but we shall not therefore feel called on to make his life uncomfortable.’

‘We have a right, also, in various ways, to act upon our unfavourable opinion of any one, not to the oppression of his individuality, but in the exercise of ours.’

‘But neither one person, nor any number of persons, is warranted in saying to another human creature of ripe years, that he shall not do with his life for his own benefit what he chooses to do with it.’

‘Mankind speedily become unable to conceive diversity, when they have been for some time unaccustomed to see it.’

‘It is only in the earlier stages that any stand can be successfully made against the encroachment’ of Individuality.

‘The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hinderance to human advancement’

‘There is no reason that all human existence should be constructed on some one or some small number of patterns.’

Mill stresses the need of individual eccentricity to counter the tyranny of opinion, and argues that the lack of eccentric characters in contemporary society ‘marks the chief danger of the time’.