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... All ideas need to be heard, because each idea contains one aspect of the truth. By examining that aspect, we add to our own idea of the truth. Even ideas that have no truth in them whatsoever are useful because by disproving them, we add support to our own ideas.

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
Need
Add
Needs
Useful
Even
Aspect
Support
Heard
Disproving
Idea
Examining
Truth
Whatsoever
Ideas
Contains

More quotes by John Stuart Mill

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The dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of the pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes.
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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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.
John Stuart Mill
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There are no means of finding what either one person or many can do, but by trying - and no means by which anyone else can discover for them what it is for their happiness to do or leave undone
John Stuart Mill
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A government with all this mass of favours to give or to withhold, however free in name, wields a power of bribery scarcely surpassed by an avowed autocracy, rendering it master of the elections in almost any circumstances but those of rare and extraordinary public excitement.
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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In proportion to the development of his individuality, each person becomes more valuable to himself, and is therefore capable of being more valuable to others. . . .
John Stuart Mill
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The disease which inflicts bureaucracy and what they usually die from is routine.
John Stuart Mill
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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.
John Stuart Mill
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To understand one woman is not necessarily to understand any other woman.
John Stuart Mill
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It would not be easy even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete, than to endeavor so to live that Christ would approve our life.
John Stuart Mill
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Among the facts of the universe to be accounted for, it may be said, is Mind and it is self evident that nothing can have produced Mind but Mind.
John Stuart Mill
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Every great movement must experience three stages: ridicule, discussion, adoption.
John Stuart Mill
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The reasons for legal intervention in favour of children apply not less strongly to the case of those unfortunate slaves and victims of the most brutal part of mankind - the lower animals.
John Stuart Mill
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Money is a machine for doing quickly and commodiously what would be done, though less quickly and commodiously, without it.
John Stuart Mill
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Liberty lies in the rights of that person whose views you find most odious.
John Stuart Mill
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The study of science teaches young men to think, while study of the classics teaches them to express thought.
John Stuart Mill
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The principles which men profess on any controverted subject are usually a very incomplete exponent of the opinions they really hold.
John Stuart Mill
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Pleasure and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends.
John Stuart Mill
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The demand for commodities is not the demand for labor.
John Stuart Mill