John Stuart Mill Quotes About Decision

“There is no act which more imperatively requires to be performed under a strong sense of individual responsibility than the nomination to employments.”

Mill treats appointments to public office as decisions requiring unusually strong personal accountability because poor nominations can substitute influence or convenience for actual qualification.

Source note: Considerations on Representative Government, Chapter V; Project Gutenberg #5669. Mill is specifically discussing administrative appointments and the proper role of representative assemblies.

“He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties.”

Choosing for oneself exercises observation, reasoning, discrimination, and self-command in ways that passive imitation does not.

Source note: On Liberty, Chapter III, in Mill’s discussion of individuality and self-directed choice.

“He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.”

Mill argues that genuine individuality requires active judgment rather than automatic conformity: a person develops the faculties of choice only by deciding for reasons he has actually examined.

Source note: On Liberty, Chapter III, “Of Individuality, as One of the Elements of Well-Being”; Project Gutenberg #34901. The sentence follows Mill's list of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity and moral preference as faculties exercised through making a choice.

“The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it.”

Institutions cannot permanently compensate for diminished citizens; public strength ultimately depends on the development and agency of individuals.

Source note: On Liberty, Chapter V; the closing argument warns against administration that improves machinery while dwarfing the people it governs.

“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.”

A life copied from convention leaves important human faculties unused; choosing deliberately requires observation, judgment and firmness.

Source note: On Liberty, Chapter III; Mill contrasts imitation with actively choosing one’s own plan of life.

“The question rests with women themselves—to be decided by their own experience, and by the use of their own faculties.”

Mill argues that women themselves must test capacities and choices through experience rather than having those possibilities defined in advance by others.

Source note: The Subjection of Women, Chapter I; the sentence belongs to Mill’s case for free development rather than prescriptive claims about women’s nature.