All Quotes

"liberals such as Mill, and later socialists and feminists of different political sympathies, likened women's situation within marriage and their deprivation of civil rights to the state of slavery. As Mill expressed it in The Subjection of Women, a text that was first published in 1861, the year of the outbreak of the American Civil War, 'no slave is a slave to the same lengths, and in so full a sense of the word, as a wife is'."

"The most virtuous and truth-loving man that I at least have ever known."

"He was a friend of my parents, and I didn't know him through that because my parents died when I was quite tiny; but nevertheless it made me know he existed, and so I read his books. And, well, they were the sort of books that would appeal to me. They were empiricist and liberal and humane. And I liked him very much."

"Mill's discussion of justice is like and unlike Hume's. Like Hume, Mill was an ethical naturalist, looking to the function of the rules of justice in social life. Unlike Hume, Mill went beyond an analysis of the emotions expressed in judgements of justice."

"We are far too apt to think of Mill as a technically philosophical writer, because we cannot help thinking of him as the author of the Logic, and to forget that he, no less than Bentham and the other utilitarians, is primarily dominated by the practical interest of the social reformer. He is really far more interested in the question of how, “once the general happiness is recognized as the ethical standard,” this ideal is to be practically realized, than in the question of the ethical criterion and its proof."

"The growing feeling that private life should be distanced from public life, and was in some sense opposed to it, wrecked the philosophic attempt to reconcile the two. Specifically it destroyed John Stuart Mill's attempt to combine social and moral philosophy under the unifying principle of utility. In one sense, Mill was successful. Setting out to provide a 'unifying social doctrine' by incorporating the 'major positive views' of his Intuitionist critics, he succeeded in giving Utilitarian justifications for many current social practices. Where Mill was much less successful was in linking his social doctrine with his morals. Mill's Autobiography is a brilliant dissection of Victorianism's mid-life crisis. It raised two problems which are vital for understanding the Cambridge civilisation of Keynes's day. First, how is one to reconcile the claims of personal happiness and social duty when the two diverge? And is happiness or pleasure an adequate aim for human conduct? Are there not some things worth doing some dispositions worth cultivating, which are valuable in themselves, irrespective of any Utilitarian justifications they might have? Is it not better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied? What Mill succeeded in doing was to make Cambridge Benthamite in that aspect of its thought which related to social policy. Mill's Utilitarianism, Cambridge mathematics and Cambridge's Nonconformist conscience were the chief constituents in what became the Cambridge School of Economics, whose founder was Alfred Marshall. What Mill failed to do was to make Cambridge moral philosophy Benthamite."

"John Stuart Mill's position as the unchallenged leader in economics and in other fields in his time was due not only to the quality of his own work but also to the happenstance that people of comparable stature did not come along at that time to contest his methods and conclusions. He was like a track star running against the clock instead of against another track star. He was never pushed — either by the criticism or the competing theories of comparably able contemporaries — to reach his utmost potential. In the long run, his reputation suffered accordingly, because in the long run there are always people of comparable stature."

"[T]he last and greatest of liberal thinkers."

"Of all my reviewers you are, perhaps, the only one who has thoroughly understood me; who has taken a general bird's-eye view of my ideas; who sees their ulterior aim, and yet has preserved a clear perception of the details."

"As increased industrial efficiency makes it possible to procure the means of livelihood with less labor, the energies of the industrious members of the community are bent to the compassing of a higher result in conspicuous expenditure, rather than slackened to a more comfortable pace. ...this want ...is indefinitely expansible, after the manner commonly imputed in economic theory to higher or spiritual wants. It is owing chiefly to the presence of this element in the standard of living that J. S. Mill was able to say that "hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being.""

"Kant and Mill disagree about many things – even basic things – not only about the substantive foundations of ethics but also about moral psychology and about how such basic moral notions as duty and conscience are to be conceived. But these differences seem to me only to make all the clearer the close parallels in their conception of the structure and aims of ethical theory."

"The dominant model is not a good one for understanding the ultimate basis of moral value, for grounding our present moral beliefs or for pointing the way to radical revisions in them. For these tasks, the older, more philosophical model found in Kant and Mill is far better."

"In bodily presence, though not commanding, at sixty he was attractive, spare in build, his voice low but harmonious, his eye sympathetic and responsive. His perfect simplicity and candour, friendly gravity with no accent of the don, his readiness of interest and curiosity, the evident love of truth and justice and improvement as the standing habit of mind—all this diffused a high, enlightening ethos that, aided by the magic halo of accepted fame, made him extraordinarily impressive."

"In his collective influence he made innumerable pulses of knowledge and thought vibrate in his generation. Respect for him became an element of men's own self-respect. How of wit or humour, you ask? He was perfectly patient of a playful sally levelled at bad reasoning, or perverse feeling, or questionable act; but for himself, we were content with his swift detection of a sophism or trenchant exposure of a fallacy, performed with a neatness, finish, and celerity that was a very passable substitute for wit."

"[H]e could be both severe and plain-spoken as anybody in Parliament or out, and knew how to run an adversary clean through with a sword that was no spinster's arm. Fitzjames Stephen, who led the first effective attack on Mill's pontifical authority, said he was cold as ice, a walking book. On the contrary, he was a man of extreme sensibility and vital heat in things worth waxing hot about. In truth he sometimes let sensibility carry him too far. One notable afternoon in European history, I saw him in an instant blaze into uncontrollable anger. It was July 14, 1870. He was sitting in his garden, and I brought him the news that France had declared war upon Prussia. He violently struck his chair and broke out in a passionate exclamation, "What a pity the bombs of Orsini missed their mark, and left the crime-stained usurper alive!""

"Ideas are not everything in a teacher, vital though they may be. Mill's merit was the extension of them in spirit and letter to social and political issues and marked events... Boundless patience went with a social hope for mankind that could never be shaken. All the grand sources of human suffering, he was convinced, are conquerable more or less by human effort."

"His sense of the miseries and wrongs of "the greatest number" was the mainspring of the resolute beneficence of thought and purpose that really made his very life and daily being... Mill would take endless trouble to procure the reversal of an inhuman sentence in a police court; he abhorred insensibility to the sufferings of our fellows in the lower order of creation. He was warm in congratulation on Freeman's attack on field sports published in the Fortnightly (1869). "I honour him," Mill wrote, "for having broken ground—a thing I have been often tempted to do myself, but having so many unpopular causes already on my hands, thought it wiser not to provoke fresh hostility.""

"I do not know whether then or at any other time so short a book ever instantly produced so wide and so important an effect on contemporary thought as did Mill's On Liberty in that day of intellectual and social fermentation (1859)... Mill believed that no symmetry, no uniformity of custom and convention, but bold, free expansion in every field, was demanded by all the needs of human life, and the best instincts of the modern mind... The little volume belongs to the rare books that after hostile criticism has done its best are still found to have somehow added a cubit to man's stature... [It] is a restatement and new reinforcement of Tolerance, discussion without restriction, the free life of the individual, so long as he does not injure other people, fair play for social experiment. On all this nothing could be more bracing than Mill's handling of his lofty case, and the idealism of it, the enthusiasm, sustained as it was for page after page, very nearly approached the electrifying region of the poetic, in the eyes of ardent men and women in our age."

"We cannot say, at any rate, that Liberty was the work of the Demagogue, either of Rationalism or anything else, because it was evidently a potent war-cry against the infallibility of Public Opinion, and the usurpation of Majorities, whether by Act of Parliament or social boycott."

"If others have their will Ann hath a way. By cock, she was to blame. She put the comether on him, sweet and twentysix. The greyeyed goddess who bends over the boy Adonis, stooping to conquer, as prologue to the swelling act, is a boldfaced Stratford wench who tumbles in a cornfield a lover younger than herself."

"Our national epic has yet to be written."

"Coffined thoughts around me, in mummycases, embalmed in spice of words. Thoth, god of libraries, a birdgod, moonycrowned. And I heard the voice of that Egyptian highpriest. In painted chambers loaded with tilebooks. They are still. Once quick in the brains of men. Still: but an itch of death is in them, to tell me in my ear a maudlin tale, urge me to wreak their will."

"As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image."

"His own image to a man with that queer thing genius is the standard of all experience, material and moral."

"The mocker is never taken seriously when he is most serious."

"Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air."

"The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea."

"He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers."

"It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked lookingglass of a servant."

"If you and I could only work together we might do something for the island. Helenise it."

"Kingstown pier, Stephen said. Yes, a disappointed bridge."

"I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy."

"Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants, willing to be dethroned."

"History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."

"Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying: — That is God. Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee! — What? Mr Deasy asked. — A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders."

"— I just wanted to say, he said. Ireland, they say, has the honour of being the only country which never persecuted the jews. Do you know that? No. And do you know why? He frowned sternly on the bright air. — Why, sir? Stephen asked, beginning to smile. — Because she never let them in, Mr Deasy said solemnly. A coughball of laughter leaped from his throat dragging after it a rattling chain of phlegm. He turned back quickly, coughing, laughing, his lifted arms waving to the air. — She never let them in, he cried again through his laughter as he stamped on gaitered feet over the gravel of the path. That’s why. On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins."

"Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices filled with crustcrumbs, fried hencod's roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine."

"— Mrkgnao! the cat said loudly. She blinked up out of her avid shameclosing eyes, mewing plaintively and long, showing him her milkwhite teeth. He watched the dark eyeslits narrowing with greed till her eyes were green stones. Then he went to the dresser, took the jug Hanlon's milkman had just filled for him, poured warmbubbled milk on a saucer and set it slowly on the floor. — Gurrhr! she cried, running to lap."

"— You don't want anything for breakfast? A sleepy soft grunt answered: — Mn."

"Vulcanic lake, the dead sea: no fish, weedless, sunk deep in the earth. No wind would lift those waves, grey metal, poisonous foggy waters. Brimstone they called it raining down: the cities of the plain: Sodom, Gomorrah, Edom. A dead sea in a dead land, grey and old. Old now. It bore the oldest, the first race. A bent hag crossed from Cassidy's clutching a noggin bottle by the neck. The oldest people. Wandered far away over all the earth, captivity to captivity, multiplying, dying, being born everywhere. It lay there now. Now it could bear no more. Dead: an old woman's: the grey sunken cunt of the world."

"Come forth Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job."

"DEAR DIRTY DUBLIN"

"Monsieur de la Palisse, Stephen sneered, was alive fifteen minutes before his death."

"Unsheathe your dagger definitions. Horseness is the whatness of allhorse. Streams of tendency and eons they worship."

"Bosh! Stephen said rudely. A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery."

"You know Manningham's story of the burgher's wife who bade Dick Burbage to her bed after she had seen him in Richard III and how Shakespeare, overhearing, without more ado about nothing, took the cow by the horns and, when Burbage came knocking at the gate, answered from the capon's blankets: William the conqueror came before Richard III."

"A father, said Stephen, battling against hopelessness, is a necessary evil."

"Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?"

"— They are sundered by a bodily shame so steadfast that the criminal annals of the world, stained with all other incests and bestialities, hardly record its breach. Sons with mothers, sires with daughters, lesbic sisters, loves that dare not speak their name, nephews with grandmothers, jailbirds with keyholes, queens with prize bulls. The son unborn mars beauty: born, he brings pain, divides affection, increases care. He is a new male: his growth is his father's decline, his youth his father's envy, his friend his father's enemy."

"Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance."