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Human beings are no longer born to their place in life...but are free to employ their faculties and such favorable chances as offer, to achieve the lot which may appear to them as desirable.

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
Place
Economics
Favorable
May
Offers
Employ
Human
Beings
Faculties
Humans
Longer
Desirable
Life
Achieve
Chances
Chance
Faculty
Free
Appear
Born
Offer

More quotes by 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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Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.
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Truth emerges from the clash of adverse ideas.
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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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My father taught me that the question Who made me? cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question, Who made God?
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A state which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes--will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished.
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The validity of all the Inductive Methods depends on the assumption that every event, or the beginning of every phenomenon, must have some cause some antecedent, upon the existence of which it is invariably and unconditionally consequent.
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The test of real and vigorous thinking, the thinking which ascertains truths instead of dreaming dreams, is successful application to practice.
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The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.
John Stuart Mill
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It is conceivable that religion may be morally useful without being intellectually sustainable.
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The most important thing women have to do is to stir up the zeal of women themselves.
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So long as an opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses in stability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it.
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I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.
John Stuart Mill
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Among the works of man, which human life is rightly employed in perfecting, the first in importance surely is man himself.
John Stuart Mill
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Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.
John Stuart Mill
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A [psychological] difficulty is not an impossibility.
John Stuart Mill
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[A] man and still more the woman, who can be accused either of doing what nobody does, or of not doing what everybody does, is the subject of as much depreciatory remark as if he or she had committed some grave moral delinquency.
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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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Miracles have no claim whatever to the character of historical facts and are wholly invalid as evidence of any revelation.
John Stuart Mill
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The true virtue of human beings is fitness to live together as equals claiming nothing for themselves but what they as freely concede to everyone else regarding command of any kind as an exceptional neccessity, and in all cases a temporary one.
John Stuart Mill