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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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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
Practice
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Society
Tyranny
Prevailing
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Mean
Opinion
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Feeling
Conduct
Magistrate

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The strongest of all arguments against the interference of the public with purely personal conduct, is that when it does interfere, the odds are that it interferes wrongly, and in the wrong place.
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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.
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Judgement is given to men that they may use it. Because it may be used erroneously, are men to be told that they ought not to use it at all?
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Almost all rich veins of original and striking speculation have been opened by systematic half-thinkers.
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Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom.
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So Long as we do not harm others we should be free to think, speak, act, & live as we see fit, without molestation from individuals, law, or gov't.
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The cause, then, philosophically speaking, is the sum total of the conditions, positive and negative, taken together the whole of the contingencies of every description, which being realized, the consequent invariably follows.
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With equality of experience and of general faculties, a woman usually sees much more than a man of what is immediately before her.
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In this age, the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric.
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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.
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The individual is not accountable to society for his actions in so far as these concern the interests of no person but himself.
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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.
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