The perpetual obstacle to human advancement is custom.
Interpretation
Customs often impede progress by holding people back from new ideas and change.
John Stuart Mill suggests that the habits and customs entrenched in society act as barriers to human progress and advancement. These established practices can prevent individuals and societies from exploring new possibilities and achieving greater potential, indicating that challenging traditional customs is essential for growth and innovation.
In practice
In a speech about innovation, one could say, 'As John Stuart Mill pointed out, the perpetual obstacle to human advancement is custom, and we must challenge the status quo.'
The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
As for charity, it is a matter in which the immediate effect on the persons directly concerned, and the ultimate consequence to the general good, are apt to be at complete war with one another.
To think that because those who wield power in society wield in the end that of government, therefore it is of no use to attempt to influence the constitution of the government by acting on opinion, is to forget that opinion is itself one of the greatest active social forces. One person with a belief is a social power equal to ninety-nine who have only interests.
There should be perfect freedom, legal and social, to do the action and stand the consequences. It would be a great misunderstanding of this doctrine to suppose that it is one of selfish indifference, which pretends that human beings have no business with each other's conduct in life, and that they should not concern themselves about the well-doing or well-being of one another, unless their own interest is involved.
Political Economy, in truth, has never pretended to give advice to mankind with no lights but its own; though people who knew nothing but political economy (and therefore knew it ill) have taken upon themselves to advise, and could only do so by such lights as they had.
Marriage is the only actual bondage known to our law. There remain no legal slaves, except the mistress of every house.
Do not commit spiritual suicide through a passion for discussing metaphysical subtleties.
IMAGINATION, n. A warehouse of facts, with poet and liar in joint ownership.
Witness testimony is always flawed. It's better than circumstantial evidence, sure, but people aren't camcorders; they don't record every action and reaction, and the very act of remembering involves chosing words, actions and images. In other words, any witness who was supposed to be giving a court facts is really just giving them a version of fiction.
Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty, and the ability to choose against it. Or to choose to ignore it.
Man in a word has no nature; what he has... is history.
My autobiography is a digressive illustration and exemplification of what race has meant in the world in the 19th and 20th centuries.
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