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John Stuart Mill Quotes about Truth

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There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home.

There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home.

John Stuart Mill
Truth, Home, Experience
John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, John Troyer (2003). “The Classical Utilitarians: Bentham and Mill”, p.183, Hackett Publishing

Not the violent conflict between parts of the truth, but the quiet suppression of half of it, is the formidable evil; there is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides; it is when they attend to only one that errors harden into prejudices, and truth itself ceases to have the effect of truth, by being exaggerated into falsehood.

John Stuart Mill
Truth, Errors, People
John Stuart Mill (1864). “On Liberty”, p.94

... the besetting danger is not so much of embracing falsehood for truth, as of mistaking a part of the truth for the whole.

John Stuart Mill
Truth, Mistake, Science
John Stuart Mill (1873). “Coleridge. M. de Tocqueville on democracy in America. Bailey on Berkeley's theory of vision. Michelets' history of France. The claims of labor. Guizot's essays and lectures on history. Early Grecian history and legend”, p.11

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.

John Stuart Mill
Truth, Ideas, Forever

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

John Stuart Mill
Truth, Halloween, Opinion
John Stuart Mill (2015). “On Liberty, Utilitarianism and Other Essays”, p.45, OUP Oxford

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.

John Stuart Mill
Truth, Honesty, Men
John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, John Troyer (2003). “The Classical Utilitarians: Bentham and Mill”, p.172, Hackett Publishing

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

John Stuart Mill
Truth, Feelings, Prejudice
John Stuart Mill (1859). “On Liberty”, p.95

Truths are known to us in two ways: some are known directly, and of themselves; some through the medium of other truths. The former are the subject of Intuition, or Consciousness; the latter, of Inference; the latter of Inference. The truths known by Intuition are the original premisses, from which all others are inferred.

John Stuart Mill
Truth, Two, Intuition
John Stuart Mill (2006). “The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill”

The laws and conditions of the production of wealth partake of the character of physical truths. There is nothing optional or arbitrary in them ... It is not so with the Distribution of Wealth. That is a matter of human institution solely. The things once there, mankind, individually or collectively, can do with them as they like.

John Stuart Mill
Truth, Character, Science
John Stuart Mill “Principles of Political Economy: Abridged with Critical, Bibliographical and Explanatory Notes and a Sketch of the History of Political Economy”, Library of Alexandria

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