John Stuart Mill Quotes

It is grander to think and investigate for yourself than to repeat a creed.

If you shut the door to all errors, truth will be shut out.

Think your own thoughts.

The proper method for hastening the decay of error is by teaching every man to think for himself.

He who dares not reason, is a slave.

The philosophical spirit is not satisfied to simply accept what it is told, no matter how much prestige the teller seems to have. This is true even if the teller is a god.

I'm absolutely not looking for someone who agrees with me about everything or someone who wants to please me by believing what I believe.

Dare to know! Have the courage to use your own understanding.

[It is] ... a sound maxim that it is better only sometimes to be right than at all times to be wrong, so soon as I discover my opinions to be erroneous, I shall be ready to renounce them.

The finest minds seem to be formed rather by efforts at original thinking, by endeavors to form new combinations, and to discover new truths, than by passively receiving the impressions of other men's ideas.

The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself... Almost inevitably, he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable.

I realized there are no lobbyists for critical thinking, and I realized there are no lobbyists for bravery.

I had always been scrupulously careful to avoid the smallest suggestion of infant indoctrination, which I think is ultimately responsible for much of the evil in the world. Others, less close to her, showed no such scruples, which upset me, as I very much wanted her, as I want all children, to make up her own mind freely when she became old enough to do so. I would encourage her to think, without telling her what to think.

A just thinker will allow full swing to his scepticism. I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I am not afraid of falling into my inkpot.... We are of different opinions at different hours, but we always may be said to be at heart on the side of truth.

Education ought to foster the wish for truth, not the conviction that some particular creed is the truth.

I want it so that every minister will be not a parrot, not an owl sitting upon a dead limb of the tree of knowledge and hooting the hoots that have been hooted for eighteen hundred years. But I want it so that each one can be an investigator, a thinker; and I want to make his congregation grand enough so that they will not only allow him to think, but will demand that he shall think, and give to them the honest truth of his thought.

Human beings never think for themselves. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told - and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion.

We may divide thinkers into those who think for themselves and those who think through others. The latter are the rule and the former the exception. The first are original thinkers in a double sense, and egotists in the noblest meaning of the word.

The principle itself of dogmatic religion, dogmatic morality, dogmatic philosophy, is what requires to be rooted out; not any particular manifestation of that principle. The very corner-stone of an education intended to form great minds, must be the recognition of the principle, that the object is to call forth the greatest possible quantity of intellectual power, and to inspire the intensest love of truth.

We owe it to our kids to inform them and train them how to think, not what to think.

But he who neither thinks for himself nor learns from others, is a failure as a man.

My fans get enough politics on TV every day. I want them to think for themselves. I don't want them to listen to me.

Question authority; think for yourself. Talk to people, do things unrelated to school - to come up with your own framework for living. The world is too complex and people are too different to be overly prescriptive about the details.

I was a freethinker before I knew how to think.

An open mind is not an end in itself but a means to the end of finding truth.