Quote

Almost all rich veins of original and striking speculation have been opened by systematic half-thinkers.

John Stuart Mill

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Intelligence
Striking
Intellectual
Systematic
Speculation
Almost
Veins
Rich
Thinker
Half
Opened
Originals
Original
Thinkers

More quotes by John Stuart Mill

Image
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.
John Stuart Mill
Image
A man of clear ideas errs grievously if he imagines that whatever is seen confusedly does not exist it belongs to him, when he meets with such a thing, to dispel the midst, and fix the outlines of the vague form which is looming through it.
John Stuart Mill
Image
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
Image
A person whose desires and impulses are his own - are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture - is said to have a character. One whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character, no more than a steam-engine has character.
John Stuart Mill
Image
Everything must be free to be written and published without restraint.
John Stuart Mill
Image
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
Image
Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness.
John Stuart Mill
Image
A profound conviction raises a man above the feeling of ridicule.
John Stuart Mill
Image
I well knew that to propose something which would be called extreme, was the true way not to impede but to facilitate a more moderate experiment.
John Stuart Mill
Image
The laws and conditions of the production of wealth partake of the character of physical truths. There is nothing optional or arbitrary in them ... It is not so with the Distribution of Wealth. That is a matter of human institution solely. The things once there, mankind, individually or collectively, can do with them as they like.
John Stuart Mill
Image
The feeling of a direct responsibility of the individual to God is almost wholly a creation of Protestantism.
John Stuart Mill
Image
The dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of the pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes.
John Stuart Mill
Image
And it is not difficult to show, by abundant instances, that to extend the bounds of what may be called moral police, until it encroaches on the most unquestionably legitimate liberty of the individual, is one of the most universal of all human propensities.
John Stuart Mill
Image
Popular opinions, on subjects not palpable to sense, are often true, but seldom or never the whole truth.
John Stuart Mill
Image
So much barbarism, however, still remains in the transactions of most civilized nations, that almost all independent countries choose to assert their nationality by having, to their inconvenience and that of their neighbors, a peculiar currency of their own.
John Stuart Mill
Image
The philosophy of reasoning, to be complete, ought to comprise the theory of bad as well as of good reasoning.
John Stuart Mill
Image
How can great minds be produced in a country where the test of great minds is agreeing in the opinion of small minds?
John Stuart Mill
Image
The worth of the state, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it.
John Stuart Mill
Image
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
Image
The guesses which serve to give mental unity and wholeness to a chaos of scattered particulars, are accidents which rarely occur to any minds but those abounding in knowledge and disciplined in intellectual combinations.
John Stuart Mill