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The spirit of improvement is not always a spirit of liberty, for it may aim at forcing improvements on an unwilling people.
John Stuart Mill
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John Stuart Mill
Age: 67 †
Born: 1806
Born: January 1
Died: 1873
Died: January 1
Autobiographer
Clerk
Economist
Egalitarianism
Philosopher
Politician
Suffragist
Writer
Islington
J. S. Mill
Aim
Liberty
Freedom
Spirit
May
Improvements
Always
Forcing
People
Unwilling
Improvement
More quotes by John Stuart Mill
If I have accomplished anything, I owe it, among other fortunate circumstances, to the fact that through the early training bestowed on me by my father, I started, I may fairly say, with an advantage of a quarter of a century over my contemporaries.
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Customs are made for customary circumstances, and customary characters.
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Belief, thus, in the supernatural, great as are the services which it rendered in the early stages of human development, cannot be considered to be any longer required, either for enabling us to know what is right and wrong in social morality, or for supplying us with motives to do right and to abstain from wrong.
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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.
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The moment one asks himself whether he is happy, he ceases to be so.
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The duty of man is the same in respect to his own nature as in respect to the nature of all other things, namely not to follow it but to amend it.
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The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good, in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.
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Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.
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Political Economy as a branch of science is extremely modern but the subject with which its enquiries are conversant has in all ages necessarily constituted one of the chief practical interests of mankind.
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But these few are the salt of the earth without them, human life would become a stagnant pool. Not only is it they who introduce good things which did not before exist, it is they who keep the life in those which already existed.
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The habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings.
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How can great minds be produced in a country where the test of great minds is agreeing in the opinion of small minds?
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Art is the employent of the powers of nature for an end.
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The worth of the state, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it.
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Miracles have no claim whatever to the character of historical facts and are wholly invalid as evidence of any revelation.
John Stuart Mill
Liberty lies in the rights of that person whose views you find most odious.
John Stuart Mill
It often happens that the universal belief of one age of mankind — a belief from which no one was, nor without an extraordinary effort of genius and courage, could at that time be free — becomes to a subsequent age so palpable an absurdity, that the only difficulty then is to imagine how such a thing can ever have appeared credible.
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Any society which is not improving is deteriorating, and the more so the closer and more familiar it is. Even a really superior man almost always begins to deteriorate when he is habitually king of his company.
John Stuart Mill
In this age, the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service.
John Stuart Mill
Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement.
John Stuart Mill
