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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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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
Progress
Improving
Almost
Superior
Company
Superiors
Society
Closer
Even
Begins
Really
Familiar
Deteriorate
Always
King
Deteriorating
Men
Kings
Habitually

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The successful conduct of an industrial enterprise requires two quite distinct qualifications: fidelity and zeal.
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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.
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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.
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The price paid for intellectual pacification is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind.
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The object of universities is not to make skillful lawyers, physicians or engineers. It is to make capable and cultivated human beings
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In this age, the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service.
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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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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.
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Not only the grounds of the opinion are forgotten in the absence of discussion, but too often the meaning of the opinion itself... Instead of a vivid conception and a living belief, there remain only a few phrases retained by rote or, if any part, the shell and husk only of the meaning is retained, the finer essence being lost.
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A profound conviction raises a man above the feeling of ridicule.
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God is a word to express, not our ideas, but the want of them.
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The principle itself of dogmatic religion, dogmatic morality, dogmatic philosophy, is what requires to be booted out not any particular manifestation of that principle.
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We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.
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What distinguishes the majority of men from the few is their inability to act according to their beliefs.
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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
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Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.
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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.
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Was there ever any domination that did not appear natural to those who possessed it?
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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.
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