Human beings are no longer born to their place in life...but are free to employ their faculties and such favorable chances as offer, to achieve the lot which may appear to them as desirable.
Interpretation
People have the freedom to shape their own destinies rather than being confined to predetermined roles in life.
John Stuart Mill emphasizes the importance of individual agency and the ability to choose one's path in life. He suggests that unlike in earlier times when social class and circumstance dictated one's role, modern individuals have the opportunity to utilize their talents and the opportunities available to them to pursue their own definitions of success and happiness.
In practice
In a motivational speech about personal growth and self-determination.
The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
As for charity, it is a matter in which the immediate effect on the persons directly concerned, and the ultimate consequence to the general good, are apt to be at complete war with one another.
To think that because those who wield power in society wield in the end that of government, therefore it is of no use to attempt to influence the constitution of the government by acting on opinion, is to forget that opinion is itself one of the greatest active social forces. One person with a belief is a social power equal to ninety-nine who have only interests.
There should be perfect freedom, legal and social, to do the action and stand the consequences. It would be a great misunderstanding of this doctrine to suppose that it is one of selfish indifference, which pretends that human beings have no business with each other's conduct in life, and that they should not concern themselves about the well-doing or well-being of one another, unless their own interest is involved.
Political Economy, in truth, has never pretended to give advice to mankind with no lights but its own; though people who knew nothing but political economy (and therefore knew it ill) have taken upon themselves to advise, and could only do so by such lights as they had.
Marriage is the only actual bondage known to our law. There remain no legal slaves, except the mistress of every house.
Whoever despises himself nonetheless respects himself as one who despises.
Nothing could be more reckless than to base one's moral philosophy on the latest pronouncements of science.
Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.
It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.
Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal.
Much of what ails our modern life is exactly because we reduce the value of a human being to a number, say salary or consumer power.
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