John Stuart Mill Quotes on Truth
Mill's On Liberty Chapter 2 — Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion — gives the canonical liberal defense of free expression as a precondition of holding any belief on rational rather than merely customary grounds. The argument has three branches: an opinion silenced may be true, and so its silencing deprives humanity of the chance to exchange error for truth; an opinion silenced may be partly true, with the prevailing view possessing only a partial truth that the suppressed dissent corrects; even a wholly true received opinion, if not contested, becomes a dead dogma rather than a living conviction. The chapter remains the most rigorous philosophical defense of viewpoint pluralism in the canon.
Quotes
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“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.”
Ch. II: Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion -
“If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”
Ch. II: Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion -
Attributed to John Stuart Mill:
“All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.”
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Attributed to John Stuart Mill:
“The dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes.”
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“We are not so absurd as to propose that the teacher should not set forth his own opinions as the true ones and exert his utmost powers to exhibit their truth in the strongest light. To abstain from this would be to nourish the worst intellectual habit of all, that of not finding, and not looking for, certainty in any teacher. But the teacher himself should not be held to any creed; nor should the question be whether his own opinions are the true ones, but whether he is well instructed in those of other people, and, in enforcing his own, states the arguments for all conflicting opinions fairly.”
Civilization," London and Westminster Review (April 1836) -
“All students of man and society who possess that first requisite for so difficult a study, a due sense of its difficulties, are aware that the besetting danger is not so much of embracing falsehood for true, as of mistaking part of the truth for the whole.”
Coleridge”. London and Westminster Review. (March 1840)