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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

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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
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Differ
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Necessarily
Phenomena
Science
Complicated
Observing
Tentative
Firsts
Consequence
Assumption
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Consequences
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Even
Follow
Confused
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Make
Learn
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More quotes by John Stuart Mill

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In the long-run, the best proof of a good character is good actions.
John Stuart Mill
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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.
John Stuart Mill
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The object of universities is not to make skillful lawyers, physicians or engineers. It is to make capable and cultivated human beings
John Stuart Mill
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Every one is degraded, whether aware of it or not, when other people, without consulting him, take upon themselves unlimited power to regulate his destiny.
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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
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Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think.
John Stuart Mill
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Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative.
John Stuart Mill
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Of two pleasures, if there be one which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure.
John Stuart Mill
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When the people are too much attached to savage independence, to be tolerant of the amount of power to which it is for their good that they should be subject, the state of society is not yet ripe for representative government.
John Stuart Mill
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On religion in particular, the time appears to me to have come, when it is a duty of all who, being qualified in point of knowledge, have, on mature consideration, satisfied themselves that the current opinions are not only false, but hurtful, to make their dissent known.
John Stuart Mill
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All political revolutions, not affected by foreign conquest, originate in moral revolutions. The subversion of established institutions is merely one consequence of the previous subversion of established opinions.
John Stuart Mill
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Originality is the one thing which unoriginal minds cannot feel the use of.
John Stuart Mill
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The triumph of the Confederacy... would be a victory for the powers of evil which would give courage to the enemies of progress and damp the sprits of its friends all over the civilized world... [The American Civil War] is destined to be a turning point, for good or evil, of the course of human affairs.
John Stuart Mill
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A government with all this mass of favours to give or to withhold, however free in name, wields a power of bribery scarcely surpassed by an avowed autocracy, rendering it master of the elections in almost any circumstances but those of rare and extraordinary public excitement.
John Stuart Mill
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The fatal tendency of mankind to leave off thinking about a thing when it is no longer doubtful is the cause of half their errors.
John Stuart Mill
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It would not be easy even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete, than to endeavor so to live that Christ would approve our life.
John Stuart Mill
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He who lets the world choose his plan of life for him has need of no other faculty than that of ape-like imitation.
John Stuart Mill
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Trade is a social act.
John Stuart Mill
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My father taught me that the question Who made me? cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question, Who made God?
John Stuart Mill
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The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it
John Stuart Mill