John Stuart Mill

The object of universities is not to make skillful lawyers, physicians or engineers. It is to make capable and cultivated human beings

We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and even if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.

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

Each undervalues that part of the materials of thought with which he is not familiar.

The perpetual obstacle to human advancement is custom.

The price paid for intellectual pacification is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind.

There is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides.

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.

It's hardly possible to overstate the value, in the present state of human improvement, of placing human beings in contact with other persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar. Such communication has always been... one of the primary sources of progress.

Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post as soon as there is no enemy in the field.

Persons of genius, it is true, are, and are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow.

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.

It is given to no human being to stereotype a set of truths, and walk safely by their guidance with his mind's eye closed.

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism.

All that makes existence valuable to any one depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people.

The pupil who is never required to do what he cannot do, never does what he can do.

All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.

Even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds

The United States is no more a Christian nation because most of its citizens are Christians than it is a 'white' nation because most of its citizens are white. We are Americans because we practice democracy and believe in republican government, not because we practice revealed religion and believe in Bible-based government.

A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury.

Life has a certain flavor for those who have fought and risked all that the sheltered and protected can never experience.