"When one's ideas are not challenged, one's ability to defend them weakens."
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John Stuart Mill quotes (page 4 of 18)
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"In the long-run, the best proof of a good character is good actions."
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"It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question."
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"The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement."
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"In all intellectual debates, both sides tend to be correct in what they affirm, and wrong in what they deny."
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"The idea that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of those pleasant falsehoods, which most experience refutes. History is teeming with instances of truth put down by persecution. If not put down forever, it may be set back for centuries."
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"Since the state must necessarily provide subsistence for the criminal poor while undergoing punishment, not to do the same for the poor who have not offended is to give a premium on crime."
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"A being who can create a race of men devoid of real freedom and inevitably foredoomed to be sinners, and then punish them for being what he has made them, may be omnipotent and various other things, but he is not what the English language has always intended by the adjective holy."
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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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"That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time."
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"The ne plus ultra of wickedness ... is embodied in what is commonly presented to mankind as the creed of Christianity."
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"There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home."
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"The world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments, of those distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue, are complete sceptics in religion."
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"All political revolutions, not affected by foreign conquest, originate in moral revolutions. The subversion of established institutions is merely one consequence of the previous subversion of established opinions."
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"Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness."
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"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."
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"The most cogent reason for restricting the interference of government is the great evil of adding unnecessarily to its power."
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"All social inequalities which have ceased to be considered expedient, assume the character not of simple inexpediency, but of injustice, and appear so tyrannical, that people are apt to wonder how they ever could have. been tolerated; forgetful that they themselves perhaps tolerate other inequalities under an equally mistaken notion of expediency, the correction of which would make that which they approve seem quite as monstrous as what they have at last learnt to condemn."
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"The disease which inflicts bureaucracy and what they usually die from is routine."
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"A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life."
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