Daily Inspiration Quote by John Stuart Mill

Mill isn’t offering a soft-focus moral reminder here; he’s tightening the screws on liberalism itself. The line expands the idea of responsibility beyond the dramatic sins we like to prosecute (the punch, the theft, the lie) into the quieter terrain where most harm actually happens: neglect, indifference, the decision to look away. It’s a sentence aimed at the comfortable, the prudent, the people who can plausibly claim clean hands because they never did anything. Mill’s move is to argue that clean hands can still be complicit.

The phrasing matters. “Not only by his actions but by his inaction” flips the usual moral alibi. Inaction is typically framed as neutrality, a lack of agency. Mill denies that escape hatch: failing to prevent foreseeable harm, or refusing to use power you have, becomes a choice with consequences. Then he adds the clincher: “in either case he is justly accountable.” That word “justly” signals a political project, not mere personal guilt. Mill is sketching a basis for social and even legal accountability that isn’t limited to direct aggression.

Contextually, this lives inside 19th-century debates about liberty, state coercion, and the “harm principle.” Mill is often read as the patron saint of “leave people alone.” This sentence complicates that brand. Liberty, for Mill, isn’t an excuse to ignore the vulnerable; it’s an ethic that demands you take harm seriously even when it’s passive, distributed, and easy to deny.