John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill was the leading English philosopher of liberalism in the nineteenth century, author of On Liberty and Utilitarianism, a career administrator for the East India Company, and Liberal MP for the City of Westminster from 1865 to 1868. Elected Lord Rector of the University of St Andrews, he used his inaugural address of 1 February 1867 to argue that private citizens cannot excuse themselves from public judgement — and it is there that he wrote the line coming closest to the famous saying. He is the nearest documented antecedent, not the author of the popular wording: Mill wrote that bad men need only that good men “look on and do nothing,” which is a different sentence from the one the internet quotes.