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Stupidity is much the same all the world over. A stupid person's notions and feelings may confidently be inferred from those which prevail in the circle by which the person is surrounded. Not so with those whose opinions and feelings are an emanation from their own nature and faculties.

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
Nature
Opinions
Inferred
May
Circles
Confidently
Persons
Stupidity
Notions
Person
Notion
Faculties
Much
Whose
Prevail
World
Stupid
Surrounded
Opinion
Circle
Feelings
Faculty
Emanation

More quotes by John Stuart Mill

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The moral influence of woman over man is almost always salutary.
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Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.
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The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or being, having an independent existence of its own. And if no real entity answering to the name could be found, men did not for that reason suppose that none existed, but imagined that it was something peculiarly abstruse and mysterious.
John Stuart Mill
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Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough there needs protection against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them.
John Stuart Mill
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He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.
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
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Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness.
John Stuart Mill
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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
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There is an imaginary circle drawn around every human being, over which no government should be able to step.
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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.
John Stuart Mill
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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
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Is there any moral enormity which might not be justified by imitation of such a Deity?
John Stuart Mill
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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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The sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable, is that people do actually desire it.
John Stuart Mill
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To do as one would be done by, and to love one's neighbour as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality
John Stuart Mill
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Liberty lies in the rights of that person whose views you find most odious.
John Stuart Mill