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If opponents of all important truths do not exist, it is indispensable to imagine them and supply them with the strongest arguments which the most skillful devil's advocate can conjure up.
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
Argument
Skillful
Devil
Advocate
Exist
Arguments
Imagine
Supply
Important
Indispensable
Opponents
Truths
Strongest
Conjure
More quotes by John Stuart Mill
Political Economy as a branch of science is extremely modern but the subject with which its enquiries are conversant has in all ages necessarily constituted one of the chief practical interests of mankind.
John Stuart Mill
When the people are too much attached to savage independence, to be tolerant of the amount of power to which it is for their good that they should be subject, the state of society is not yet ripe for representative government.
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Art is the employent of the powers of nature for an end.
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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 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
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
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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The object of universities is not to make skillful lawyers, physicians or engineers. It is to make capable and cultivated human beings
John Stuart Mill
A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another, and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government.
John Stuart Mill
But these few are the salt of the earth without them, human life would become a stagnant pool. Not only is it they who introduce good things which did not before exist, it is they who keep the life in those which already existed.
John Stuart Mill
All the good of which humanity is capable is comprised in obedience.
John Stuart Mill
Every great movement must experience three stages: ridicule, discussion, adoption.
John Stuart Mill
The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good, in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.
John Stuart Mill
However unwillingly a person who has a strong opinion may admit the possibility that his opinion may be false, he ought to be moved by the consideration that, however true it may be, if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth.
John Stuart Mill
All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.
John Stuart Mill
Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.
John Stuart Mill
A democratic constitution, not supported by democratic institutions in detail, but confined to the central government, not only is not political freedom, but often creates a spirit precisely the reverse, carrying down to the lowest grade in society the desire and ambition of political domination.
John Stuart Mill
Over one's mind and over one's body the individual is sovereign.
John Stuart Mill
Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of the representative government, cannot exist.
John Stuart Mill
A person's taste is as much his own peculiar concern as his opinion or his purse.
John Stuart Mill