Free Thinkers Quotes

• Is there any man that thinks in chains like the man who calls himself a free-thinker? Is there any man so credulous as the man who will not believe in the Bible? He swallows a ton of difficulties, and yet complains that we have swallowed an ounce of them. He has much more need of faith of a certain sort than we have, for skepticism has far harder problems than faith.

  Charles Spurgeon

  Believe, Men, Thinking

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• The idea of a personal God is quite alien to me and seems even naïve.

  Albert Einstein

  Ideas, Aliens, Seems

  Albert Einstein (2010). “The Ultimate Quotable Einstein”, p.341, Princeton University Press

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• Freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science.

  Charles Darwin

  Atheist, Men, Illumination

  Charles Darwin (2015). “Darwin on Evolution: Words of Wisdom from the Father of Evolution”, p.34, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

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• The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Bible, Christian, Religious

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• Religions are all alike- founded upon fables and mythologies.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Religious, Atheist, Secular Society

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• We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes.

  Gene Roddenberry

  Motivational, Death, Spiritual

  "Can A Smart Person Believe in God?". Book by Michael Guillen, Chapter 7: "Hope Springs Eternal," p. 90, 2004.

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• Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect.

  James Madison

  Religious, Atheist, Secular Society

  James Madison, Ralph Ketcham “Selected Writings of James Madison”, Hackett Publishing

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• Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.

  Isaac Asimov

  Death, Atheist, If There Is A God

  Isaac Asimov (1995). “Yours, Isaac Asimov: A Lifetime of Letters”, Doubleday Books

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• This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.

  John Adams

  Religious, Atheist, If There Is A God

  John Adams, Abigail Adams, Thomas Jefferson (1988). “The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams”

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• All religions have been made by men.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Atheist, Men, Religion

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• 

  Be a free thinker and don't accept everything you hear as truth. Be critical and evaluate what you believe in.

  Aristotle

  Believe, Truth Is, Accepting

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• I love to consider an Infidel, whether distinguished by the title of deist, atheist, or free-thinker, by three different lights, in his solitude, his afflictions, and his last moments.... [In these situations such people show themselves] in solitude, incapable or rapture or elevation, ... in distress, [with] a halter or a pistol the only refuge [they] can fly to, ... [and liable to conversion] at the approach of death.

  Richard Steele

  Atheist, Light, People

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• I think it's very desirable to be an individual and a free thinker.

  Paul Newman

  Thinking, Individual, Thinker

  Source: bitesizecliftbar.tumblr.com

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• Well, it's an ancestral tribe. These were immigrants from north of Germany who came here about the time of the Civil War, but anyway, these people called themselves free thinkers. They were impressed, incidentally, by Darwin. They're called Humanists now; people who aren't so sure that the Bible is the Word of God.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  War, People, Germany

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• There are Harvard grads, free thinkers, feminists, abolitionists, well-to-do people who want to go write poetry and live on a farm and cook and laugh and have a good time. As they themselves described it, it was an "inward facing" community. They were focusing on making a better existence for themselves, which I think is also the driving force of 20th century communalism in the US, the thought being that the world is corrupt, and we're going to build this little garden of innocence.

  Christine Jennings

  Writing, Garden, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

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• We need more people speaking out. This country is not overrun with rebels and free thinkers. It's overrun with sheep and conformists.

  Bill Maher

  Country, Sheep, People

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• The Bible defines almost nothing because it isn't a book for scholars and philosophers or free thinkers. It's a book for people who want help. It's primarily a book for pastors. They're the ones that can use it in a way so that it actually achieves its purpose.

  Dallas Willard

  Book, People, Purpose

  Source: renovare.org

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• You have two choices with Obama. You either believe that he is a man of Christ... or you think he's a liar. And I'm surprised by the number of atheist free thinkers that support Obama, and their argument is essentially, 'He's lying about being religious 'cause you have to do that to get elected.' It's a horrible reason to like somebody.

  Penn Jillette

  Religious, Atheist, Liars

  "Penn Jillette: An Atheist's Guide to the 2012 Election" by Daniel Honan, bigthink.com.

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• I love to consider an Infidel, whether distinguished by the title of deist, atheist, or free-thinker.

  Richard Steele

  Atheist, Atheism, Titles

  Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele, Alexander Chalmers (1822). “The Tatler”, p.199

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• It is largely because the free-thinkers, as a school, have hardly made up their minds whether they want to be more optimist or more pessimist than Christianity that their small but sincere movement has failed.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  School, Mind, Movement

  "The Victorian Age in Literature". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, Ch. II: The Great Victorian Novelists, p. 73, 1913.

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• It would much conduce to the public benefit, if, instead of discouraging free-thinking, there was erected in the midst of this free country a dianoetic academy, or seminary for free-thinkers, provided with retired chambers, and galleries, and shady walks and groves, where, after seven years spent in silence and meditation, a man might commence a genuine free-thinker, and from that time forward, have license to think what he pleased, and a badge to distinguish him from counterfeits.

  George Berkeley

  Country, Men, Thinking

  George Berkeley (1732). “Alciphron: Or, The Minute Philosopher. In Seven Dialogues. Containing an Apology for the Christian Religion Against Those who are Called Free-thinkers ...”, p.216

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• What makes a free thinker is not his beliefs, but the way in which he holds them. If he holds them because his elders told him they were true when he was young, or if he holds them because if he did not he would be unhappy, his thought is not free; but if he holds them because, after careful thought, he finds a balance in their favor, then his thought is free, however odd his conclusions may seem.

  Bertrand Russell

  Balance, Atheism, Unhappy

  Bertrand Russell (1944). “The Value of Free Thought: How to Become a Truth-seeker and Break the Chains of Mental Slavery”

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• A free thinker used to be a man who had been educated on ideas of religion, law, morality, and had arrived at free thought by virtue of his own struggle and toil; but now a new type of born freethinker has been appearing, who’ve never even heard that there have been laws of morality and religion, and that there are authorities, but who simply grow up with negative ideas about everything, that is savages.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Growing Up, Struggle, Men

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• There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one's grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Courage, Morning, Flower

  "What's Wrong With the World". Book by G. K. Chesterton, 1910.

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• Others indeed may talk, and write, and fight about liberty, and make an outward pretence to it but the free-thinker alone is truly free.

  George Berkeley

  Writing, Fighting, Liberty

  George Berkeley (1871). “The Works of George Berkeley: Philosophical works”, p.37

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