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Strange it is that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free speech but object to their being pushed to an extreme, not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case.
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
Good
Speech
Arguments
Men
Objects
Extreme
Unless
Admit
Cases
Extremes
Strange
Object
Seeing
Reasons
Free
Argument
Validity
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Case
Pushed
More quotes by John Stuart Mill
The pupil who is never required to do what he cannot do, never does what he can do.
John Stuart Mill
Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.
John Stuart Mill
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.
John Stuart Mill
All desirable things... are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as a means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain.
John Stuart Mill
No one can be a great thinker who does not recognize that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead.
John Stuart Mill
Men are men before they are lawyers, or physicians, or merchants, or manufacturers and if you make them capable and sensible men, they will make themselves capable and sensible lawyers or physicians.
John Stuart Mill
Persons of genius are, ex vi termini, more individual than any other people - less capable, consequently, of fitting themselves, without hurtful compression, into any of the small number of moulds which society provides in order to save its members the trouble of forming their character.
John Stuart Mill
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
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
Whatever helps to shape the human being - to make the individual what he is, or hinder him from being what he is not - is part of his education.
John Stuart Mill
The demand for commodities is not the demand for labor.
John Stuart Mill
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
The duty of man is the same in respect to his own nature as in respect to the nature of all other things, namely not to follow it but to amend it.
John Stuart Mill
Every man who says frankly and fully what he thinks is so far doing a public service. We should be grateful to him for attacking most unsparingly our most cherished opinions.
John Stuart Mill
The test of real and vigorous thinking, the thinking which ascertains truths instead of dreaming dreams, is successful application to practice.
John Stuart Mill
The individual is not accountable to society for his actions in so far as these concern the interests of no person but himself.
John Stuart Mill
Marriage is the only actual bondage known to our law. There remain no legal slaves, except the mistress of every house.
John Stuart Mill
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.
John Stuart Mill
Every established fact which is too bad to admit of any other defence is always presented to us as an injunction of religion.
John Stuart Mill
A people may prefer a free government, but if by momentary discouragement or temporary panic, or a fit of enthusiasm for an individual, they can be induced to lay their liberties at the feet of even a great man, or trust him with powers to subvert their institutions, in all these cases they are unfit for liberty.
John Stuart Mill