All good things which exist are the fruits of originality.

John Stuart Mill makes this remark in the course of defending “individuality” against the pressures of custom and social conformity in Victorian Britain. In On Liberty (1859), Mill argues that a free society depends not only on protecting people from coercion, but also on leaving room for experiments in living—unusual opinions, lifestyles, and character types. His broader aim is to show that progress in morals, politics, science, and culture comes from allowing nonconformists to think and act differently, even when the majority finds them eccentric or threatening. The line appears as part of Mill’s case that originality is a social good, not merely a private preference.

Mill’s claim is that what we value as “good”—new truths, better institutions, improved arts, and moral advances—does not arise from mere repetition of inherited habits. It comes from original minds willing to depart from convention, test alternatives, and sometimes fail publicly. The quote also implies a warning: societies that prize uniformity may enjoy short-term order but will stagnate, because they suppress the very source of improvement. For Mill, originality is not eccentricity for its own sake; it is the engine of human development, supplying fresh ideas that, once proven, can become shared benefits.