John Stuart Mill Quotes About Evil
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Christian morality (so called) has all the characters of a reaction; it is, in great part, a protest against Paganism. Its ideal is negative rather than positive; passive rather than action; innocence rather than Nobleness; Abstinence from Evil, rather than energetic Pursuit of Good: in its precepts (as has been well said) "thou shalt not" predominates unduly over "thou shalt.
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The ne plus ultra of wickedness ... is embodied in what is commonly presented to mankind as the creed of Christianity.
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The triumph of the Confederacy... would be a victory for the powers of evil which would give courage to the enemies of progress and damp the sprits of its friends all over the civilized world... [The American Civil War] is destined to be a turning point, for good or evil, of the course of human affairs.
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All attempts by the State to bias the conclusions of its citizens on disputed subjects, are evil.
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There is a very real evil consequent on ascribing supernatural origin to the received maxilms of morality. That origin consecrates the whole of them and protects them from being discussed or criticized.
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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.
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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.
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The most cogent reason for restricting the interference of government is the great evil of adding unnecessarily to its power.
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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.
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No longer enslaved or made dependent by force of law, the great majority are so by force of property; they are still chained to a place, to an occupation, and to conformity with the will of an employer, and debarred by the accident of birth to both the enjoyments, and from the mental and moral advantages, which others inherit without exertion and independently of desert. That this is an evil equal to almost any of those against which mankind have hitherto struggles, the poor are not wrong in believing.
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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.
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All errors which a man is likely to commit against advice are far outweighed by the evil of allowing others to constrain him for his good.
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