John Stuart Mill, FRSE (20 May 1806 – 8 May 1873) was a British philosopher, political economist and civil servant. He was an influential contributor to social theory, political theory, and political economy. He has been called "the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century". Mill's conception of liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control. He was a proponent of utilitarianism, an ethical theory developed by Jeremy Bentham. Hoping to remedy the problems found in an inductive approach to science, such as confirmation bias, he clearly set forth the premises of falsification as the key component in the scientific method. Mill was also a Member of Parliament and an important figure in liberal political philosophy.
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“All that makes existence valuable to any one depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people.”
—John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)
“His pain was too great. He begged me for the simple mercy of death. And I could do nothing else but help him leave a world that had become a sleepless, tortured nightmare to him.”
—Robert D. Andrews, and Nick Grindé. Dr. John Garth (Boris Karloff)
“A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.”
—John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)
“Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which grinds your stuff to any degree of fineness; but, nevertheless, what you get out depends on what you put in; and as the grandest mill in the world will not extract wheat flour from peascods, so pages of formulae will not get a definite result out of loose data.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895)