Phoebe > Recent Status Updates

‘In such cases men do not need much expression. A grip of the hand, the tightening of an arm over the shoulder, a sob in union, are expressions of sympathy dear to a man’s heart.’

‘But I cannot consent to argue the point as if society had no means of bringing its weaker members up to its ordinary standard of rational conduct, expect waiting till they do something irrational, and then punishing them, legally or morally, for it.’

‘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’.

‘In this age, the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service.’

On the initiative on an individual genius: ‘All he can claim is, freedom to point out the way. The power of compelling others into it, is not only inconsistent with the freedom and development of all the rest, but corrupting the strong man himself.’

‘At present individuals are lost in the crowd. In politics it is almost a triviality to say that public opinion now rules the world.’

‘Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom.’

‘I feel there is something ominous in his calm, and shall not forget this night…’

‘One whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character, no more than a steam-engine has a character.’

‘It is not because men’s desires are strong they act ill; it is because their consciences are weak.’

‘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.’

‘He who lets 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.’

‘The human faculties of perception, judgement, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice.’

‘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.’

‘If Christians would teach infidels to be just to Christianity, they should themselves be just to infidelity.’

Christian morality ‘is essentially a doctrine of passive obedience.’

The ideal of Christian morality is ‘negative rather than positive; […] Abstinence from Evil, rather than energetic Pursuit of Good: in its precepts ‘thou shalt not’ predominantes unduly over ‘thou shalt’.

‘If there are any persons who contest a received opinion, or who will do so if law or opinion will let them, let us thank them for it, open our minds to listen to them, and rejoice that there is some one to do for us what we otherwise ought, if we have any regard for either the certainty or the vitality or our convictions, to do so with much greater labour for ourselves.’