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It's hardly possible to overstate the value, in the present state of human improvement, of placing human beings in contact with other persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar. Such communication has always been... one of the primary sources of progress.
John Stuart Mill -
The feeling of a direct responsibility of the individual to God is almost wholly a creation of Protestantism.
John Stuart Mill
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... what is really inspiriting and ennobling in the doctrine of freewill, is the conviction that we have real power over the formation of our own character; that our will, by influencing some of our circumstances, can modify our future habits or capabilities of willing.
John Stuart Mill -
For I now saw, or thought I saw, what I had always before received with incredulity - that the habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings: as indeed it has, when no other mental habit is cultivated, and the analysing spirit remains without its natural complements and correctives.
John Stuart Mill -
All the good of which humanity is capable is comprised in obedience.
John Stuart Mill -
The great writers to whom the world owes what religious liberty it possesses, have mostly asserted freedom of conscience as an indefeasible right, and denied absolutely that a human being is accountable to others for his religious belief.
John Stuart Mill -
The great creative individual . . . is capable of more wisdom and virtue than collective man ever can be.
John Stuart Mill -
No slave is a slave to the same lengths, and in so full a sense of the word, as a wife is.
John Stuart Mill
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Was there ever any domination that did not appear natural to those who possessed it?
John Stuart Mill -
A pupil from whom nothing is ever demanded which he cannot do never does all he can.
John Stuart Mill -
Popular opinions, on subjects not palpable to sense, are often true, but seldom or never the whole truth.
John Stuart Mill -
It is useful that while mankind are imperfect there should be different opinions, so is it that there should be different experiments of living; that free scope should be given to varieties of character, short of injury to others.
John Stuart Mill -
The process of tracing regularity in any complicated, and at first sight confused, set of appearances, is necessarily tentative; we begin by making any supposition, even a false one, to see what consequences will follow from it ; and by observing how these differ from the real phenomena, we learn what corrections to make in our assumption.
John Stuart Mill -
...there ought to exist the fullest liberty of professing and discussing, as a matter of ethical conviction, any doctrine, however immoral it may be considered.
John Stuart Mill
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It must be granted that in every syllogism, considered as an argument to prove the conclusion, there is a petitio principii. When we say, All men are mortal Socrates is a man therefore Socrates is mortal; it is unanswerably urged by the adversaries of the syllogistic theory, that the proposition, Socrates is mortal.
John Stuart Mill -
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.
John Stuart Mill -
The application of algebra to geometry... far more than any of his metaphysical speculations, has immortalized the name of Descartes, and constitutes the greatest single step ever made in the progress of the exact sciences.
John Stuart Mill -
If opponents of all important truths do not exist, it is indispensable to imagine them and supply them with the strongest arguments which the most skillful devil's advocate can conjure up.
John Stuart Mill -
Though it is only in a very imperfect state of the world's arrangements that anyone can best serve the happiness of others by the absolute sacrifice of his own, yet, so long as the world is in that imperfect state, I fully acknowledge that the readiness to make such a sacrifice is the highest virtue which can be found in man.
John Stuart Mill -
It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being.
John Stuart Mill
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No one can be a great thinker who does not recognize that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead.
John Stuart Mill -
Nothing contributes more to nourish elevation of sentiments in a people, than the large and free character of their habitations.
John Stuart Mill -
The philosophy of reasoning, to be complete, ought to comprise the theory of bad as well as of good reasoning.
John Stuart Mill -
The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
John Stuart Mill