John Stuart Mill Quotes

Writers should provoke disagreement.

An opinion which excites no opposition at all is not worth having!

And I think both the left and the right should celebrate people who have different opinions, and disagree with them, and argue with them, and differ with them, but don't just try to shut them up.

Contention is inseparable from creating knowledge. It is not contention we should try to avoid, but discourses that attempt to suppress contention.

Freedom is hammered out on the anvil of discussion, dissent, and debate.

I love disagreements. I love the democratic process. If I'm in a room where everybody agrees, I start to nod off.

I love argument, I love debate. I don't expect anyone just to sit there and agree with me, that's not their job.

In fact, I would defend to the death their right to express a different point of view.

You know, everybody believes in free speech until you start questioning them about it.

There are truths to be discovered, but they are complex and many-sided; the best way to get to them is by engaging contrary ideas in a manner approximating dialogue.

There are people who consider it almost unpatriotic to be inquisitive and to be truthful about your opinions.

You've got to ensure that the holders of an opinion, however unpopular, are allowed to put across their points of view.

It is not undemocratic to express one's difference of opinion.

Those who know my stance on Israeli democracy also know that there is nothing more foreign to me than the rejection of a position different to my own.

Everybody has their opinion. I respect anything that anybody has to say.

'In his celebrated book, 'On Liberty', the English philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that silencing an opinion is "a peculiar evil." If the opinion is right, we are robbed of the "opportunity of exchanging error for truth"; and if it's wrong, we are deprived of a deeper understanding of the truth in its "collision with error." If we know only our own side of the argument, we hardly know even that: it becomes stale, soon learned by rote, untested, a pallid and lifeless truth.'

I lived with people who had varied opinions, some of whom did not accept my Nazi views. I encouraged this. If a man said something that was critical of me or my ideas, I wouldn't consider him an enemy.

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.

If you're going to have an exchange of ideas, the only thing you can do is to meet people face-to-face in front of a crowd who may think differently than you do. I mean, that's what democracy is about, isn't it?

Conflict is the pursuit of truth.

I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means.

Dissent... is a right essential to any concept of the dignity and freedom of the individual; it is essential to the search for truth in a world wherein no authority is infallible.

What all agree upon is probably right; what no two agree in most probably is wrong.

They’re like,‘If you have an opinion against us, we’re gonna shut you down.' That’s not American. If you’re gay you should have the right to be gay in peace, and if you’re against it you should have the right to be against it in peace.

I may not agree with what you have to say but I will fight you to the death for the right to fight you to the death.