Free Thought Quotes - Page 2

• I think the trend to control speech - and therefore thought - continues. Because of the freer flow of information now, there's more on the side of free thought.

  George Carlin

  Thinking

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• The psychologists and the metaphysicians wrangle endlessly over the nature of the thinking process in man, but no matter how violently they differ otherwise they all agree that it has little to do with logic and is not much conditioned by overt facts.

  H. L. Mencken

  Truth, Learning, Knowledge

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.311, Knopf

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• It should seem that Negroes, of all Americans, would be found in the Free-thought fold, since they have suffered more than any other class of Americans from the dubious blessings of Christianity.

  Hubert Harrison

  Blessing, Class, Dubious

  Hubert Harrison, Jeffrey B. Perry (2001). “A Hubert Harrison Reader”, p.43, Wesleyan University Press

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• I am not fully informed of the practices at Harvard, but there is one from which we shall certainly vary, although it has been copied, I believe, by nearly every college and academy in the United States. That is, the holding the students all to one prescribed course of reading, and disallowing exclusive application to those branches only which are to qualify them for the particular vocations to which they are destined. We shall, on the contrary, allow them uncontrolled choice in the lectures they shall choose to attend, and require elementary qualification only, and sufficient age.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Education, Reading, Believe

  Thomas Jefferson, Jerry Holmes (2002). “Thomas Jefferson: A Chronology of His Thoughts”, p.294, Rowman & Littlefield

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• We [entrepreneurs] required that you leave us free to function -- free to think and work as we choose ... -- free to earn our own profits and make our own fortunes ... Such was the price we asked, which you chose to reject as too high.

  Ayn Rand

  Science, Thinking, Entrepreneur

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• The period of Catholic ascendancy was on the whole one of the most deplorable in the history of the human mind. . . . The spirit that shrinks from enquiry as sinful and deems a state of doubt a state of guilt, is the most enduring disease that can afflict the mind of man. Not till the education of Europe passed from the monasteries to the universities, not till Mohammedan science, and classical free thought, and industrial independence broke the sceptre of the Church, did the intellectual revival of Europe begin.

  William Edward Hartpole Lecky

  Men, Europe, Catholic

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• Lose this day loitering 'Twill be the same old story, Tomorrow and the next, Even more dilatory. Whatever you would do, Or dream of doing, begin it! Boldness has power, genius, and magic in it. Begin it now.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Dream, Courage, Responsibility

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• In view of the tide of religiosity engulfing a once secular republic it is refreshing to be reminded by Freethinkers that free thought and skepticism are robustly in the American tradition. After all the Founding Fathers began by omitting God from the American Constitution.

  Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

  Father, Views, Republic

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• I deny the right of Congress to force a slaveholding State upon an unwilling people. I deny their right to force a free State upon an unwilling people. I deny their right to force a good thing upon a people who are unwilling to receive it. The great principle is the right of every community to judge and decide for itself, whether a thing is right or wrong, whether it would be good or evil for them to adopt it; and the right of free action, the right of free thought, the right of free judgment upon the question is dearer to every true American than any other under a free government.

  Stephen A. Douglas

  War, Government, People

  Bob Blaisdell, Stephen A. Douglas (2012). “The Lincoln-Douglas Debates”, p.16, Courier Corporation

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• Free thought, free speech and a free press.

  Anne Royall

  Freedom, Speech, Free Press

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• As long as man remains an inquiring animal, there can never be a complete unanimity in our fundamental beliefs. The more diverse our paths, the greater is likely to be the divergence of beliefs.

  Arthur Keith

  Faith, Respect, Learning

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• Most new insights come only after a superabundant accumulation of facts have removed the blindness which prevented us from seeing what later comes to be regarded as obvious.

  Isidor Isaac Rabi

  Learning, Science, History

  Isidor Isaac Rabi (1960). “My Life and Times as a Physicist”

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• You behold in me, Stephen said with grim displeasure, a horrible example of free thought.

  James Joyce

  Example, Said, Horrible

  James Joyce (2016). “James Joyce The Dover Reader”, p.403, Courier Dover Publications

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• If there's one American belief I hold above all others, it's that those who would set themselves up in judgment on matters of what is "right" and what is "best" should be given no rest; that they should have to defend their behavior most stringently. ... As a nation, we've been through too many fights to preserve our rights of free thought to let them go just because some prude with a highlighter doesn't approve of them

  Stephen King

  Fighting, Rights, Should Have

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• Many of the Latter-day Saints have surrendered their independence; they have surrendered their free thought, politically, and we have got to get back to where we are not surrendering the right. We must stay with the right and if we do so God will bless us.

  Heber J. Grant

  Independence, Saint, Constitution

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• It is the way, isn't it? With humans and free thought. They only learn through terrible mistakes. Free thought does not make wisdom. Instead it creates enough space for men to commit terrible folly, from which the survivors learn through disaster.

  Joel Shepherd

  Mistake, Men, Space

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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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• The stony-minded orthodox were right in fearing the first movement of new knowledge and free thought. It has gone on, and will go on, irresistibly, until some day we shall have no respect for an alleged "truth" which cannot stand the full blaze of knowledge, the full force of active thought.

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  Atheism, Firsts, Gone

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1935). “The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography”, p.322, Univ of Wisconsin Press

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• If what is best in mankind, and what its progress depends on, manifests itself primarily in the individual and only secondarily in the mass, then our objectives should be to maintain such freedom as allows the individual to think and speak for himself.

  Louis J. Halle

  Freedom, Thinking, Progress

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• Free inquiry entails recognition of civil liberties as integral to its pursuit, that is, a free press, freedom of communication, the right to organize opposition parties and to join voluntary associations, and freedom to cultivate and publish the fruits of scientific, philosophical, artistic, literary, moral and religious freedom.

  Paul Kurtz

  Religious, Party, Communication

  Paul Kurtz (1983). “In defense of secular humanism”, Prometheus Books

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• as an economics professor I am by nature inclined to the view that the truth isn't out there, it's in here - that usually you learn a lot more by thinking really hard about the data than you do by sniffing around for supposedly inside information.

  Paul Krugman

  Truth, Thinking, Views

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• The First Amendment isn't about free thought and free opinion and free belief. The First Amendment is about free exercise: the carrying into practice of religious principles and beliefs and convictions.

  Alan Keyes

  Religious, Exercise, Free Opinion

  Alan Keyes' Remarks at the Alabama Republican Assemblies Luncheon, www.keyesarchives.com. April 29, 2000.

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• Weak logic, inconsistencies and alienation from the people are common features of authoritarianism. The relentless attempts of totalitarian regimes to prevent free thought and new ideas and the persistent assertion of their own rightness bring on them an intellectual stasis which they project on to the nation at large. Intimidation and propaganda work in a duet of oppression, while the people, lapped in fear and distrust, learn to dissemble and to keep silent.

  Aung San Suu Kyi

  Ideas, People, Intellectual

  "In Quest of Democracy". Essay by Aung San Suu Kyi, 1991.

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• We hold that the greatest right in the world is the right to be wrong, that in the exercise thereof people have an inviolable right to express their unbridled thoughts on all topics and personalities, being liable only for the abuse of that right.

  William Randolph Hearst

  Exercise, People, Personality

  Platform, Independent League; "New York Journal-American", February 1, 1924.

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• To some, freedom means the opportunity to do what they want to do; to most it means not to do what they do not want to do. It is perhaps true that those who can grow will feel free under any condition.

  Eric Hoffer

  Respect, Freedom, Mean

  Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

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