John Stuart Mill

Popular opinions, on subjects not palpable to sense, are often true, but seldom or never the whole truth.

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.

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. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.

The principles which men profess on any controverted subject are usually a very incomplete exponent of the opinions they really hold.

Every great movement must experience three stages: ridicule, discussion, adoption.

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.

Induction is a process of inference; it proceeds from the known to the unknown.

It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being.

Laws and systems of polity always begin by recognizing the relations they find already existing between individuals.

The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.