John Stuart Mill Quotes

If you give the government the right to determine the consumption of the human body, to determine whether one should smoke or not smoke, drink or not drink, there is no good reply you can give to people who say, More important than the body is the mind and the soul, and man hurts himself much more by reading bad books, by listening to bad music and looking at bad movies. Therefore it is the duty of the government to prevent people from committing those faults. And, as you know, for many hundreds of years governments and authorities velieved that it was their duty.

Prohibition is a deathblow to the liberty of the individual …

No one can quarrel with those who desire to maintain the theatre on a proper moral plane, but we are seeing too much in the world today of an effort to regulate too minutely by law the lives and morals of whole groups of people.

Man does not have an inalienable right to personal or reproductive freedom, if such freedom is a menace to society.

The state ought not to intervene to prevent individuals from doing things that not only are no risk to others but are of no risk to themselves either.

The state in the matter of drugs should not, any more than in the matter of sex, act as the secret agent for the agenda of the church.

It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life. For my part, I should be inclined to think freedom less necessary in the great things than in the little ones, if it were possible to be secure of the one without the other.

Where licentiousness begins, liberty ends.

We do not move forward by curtailing people's liberty because we are afraid of what they may do or say.

We’re not so free that we don’t have to listen to rules, and laws, and regulations. Those are important. But the spirit, the freedom of the spirit, that’s what I think of American Dream, that we are free here to do what we want to do, what we set out to do.

I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws but to repeal them.

Whatever the issue, let freedom offer us a hundred choices, instead of having government force one answer on everyone.

My faith in the proposition that each man should do precisely as he pleases with all which is exclusively his own lies at the foundation of the sense of justice there is in me.

Individualism, the love of enterprise, and the pride in personal freedom, have been deemed by Americans not only as their choicest, but their peculiar and exclusive possessions.

Liberty cannot be sacrificed for the sake of anything.

If we're free to do what we want, why does government always have a plan for us?

My rap comes from a sociological standpoint rather than picking a particular side or dogma or ideology. I just want people to be free to do what they want, as long as they don't harm others.

I have only to speak for myself; to speak for freedom for myself; to determine for freedom for myself; and in doing so, I speak and determine for the freedom of every slave on every plantation, and for the fugitives on my right hand.

I don't conjure up ways of denying people freedom. I don't sit around and examine what people do that I don't like and try to figure out ways to get them to stop it, unless we're talking about lawbreakers, of course. But I'm a freedom, liberty, live and let live kind of guy. I might not approve of or like what people do, but have at it.

It profits me but little, after all, that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquility of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life.

The state can't give you freedom, and the state can't take it away. You're born with it, like your eyes, like your ears. Freedom is something you assume, then you wait for someone to try to take it away. The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free.

No man can be truly free whose liberty is dependent upon the thought, feeling and action of others, and who has himself no means in his own hands for guarding, protecting, defending and maintaining that liberty

Government seems to operate on the principle that if even one individual is incapable of using his freedom competently, no one can be allowed to be free.

The one thing more difficult than following a regime is keeping from imposing it on others.

Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now.