Intellectual Freedom Quotes

• Intellectual freedom is essential -- freedom to obtain and distribute information, freedom for open-minded and unfearing debate and freedom from pressure by officialdom and prejudices. Such freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of people by mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorship.

  Andrei Sakharov

  Freedom, Hypocrite, Hands

  Andrei D. Sakharov (1968). “Progress, coexistence, and intellectual freedom”

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• Mental slavery is mental death, and every man who has given up his intellectual freedom is the living coffin of his dead soul.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Men, Soul, Intellectual

  Robert Green Ingersoll (1907). “The works of Robert G. Ingersoll”, p.103, Library of Alexandria

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• Intellectual freedom is the only guarantee of a scientific - democratic approach to politics, economic development, and culture.

  Andrei Sakharov

  Freedom, Intellectual, Democracy

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• Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.

  John F. Kennedy

  Inspirational, Being Yourself, Freedom

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• Intellectual freedom depends upon material things.

  Virginia Woolf

  Intellectual, Materials, Depends

  Virginia Woolf, Morag Shiach (1998). “A Room of One's Own: And, Three Guineas”, p.141

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• My father had retained an emotional affection for the ceremonial of his parental home, without allowing it to influence his intellectual freedom

  Franz Boas

  Father, Home, Emotional

  Franz Boas (1989). “A Franz Boas Reader: The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883-1911”, p.41, University of Chicago Press

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• Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.

  John Milton

  Freedom, Giving, Liberty

  'Areopagitica' (1644) p. 34

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• Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.

  William O. Douglas

  Teaching, Rights In America, Political Revolution

  "The One Un-American Act". William O. Douglas' speech to the Author's Guild Council in New York on receiving the 1951 Lauterbach Award, December 3, 1952.

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• What I was utterly convinced of, and still am, is the idea that the only responsibility the free intellectual has is vis-a-vis himself. He is not responsible to either a political party or a ruler.

  Tawfiq al-Hakim

  Party, Responsibility, Ideas

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• The history of intellectual growth and discovery clearly demonstrates the need for unfettered freedom, the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable. To curtail free expression strikes twice at intellectual freedom, for whoever deprives another of the right to state unpopular views necessarily also deprives others of the right to listen to those views.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Thinking, Discovery, Views

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• Don't join the book burners!

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  Book, Library, Censorship

  Remarks at Dartmouth College Commencement, Hanover, N.H., 14 June 1953

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• To curtail free expression strikes twice at intellectual freedom, for whoever deprives another of the right to state unpopular views necessarily deprives others of the right to listen to those views.

  C. Vann Woodward

  War, Views, Expression

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• When the nazis came to power, I looked to the universities that prided themselves upon their intellectual freedom, and they failed me. I looked to the German press, which prided itself on the freedom of the press, and it failed me. Until at last the churches stood alone, and that for which I once had little regard earned my respect.

  Albert Einstein

  Business, Intellectual, Society

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• It is this capacity for relentless self-criticism that should be - everywhere - the true measure of intellectual freedom and cosmopolitanism, not the entrenched cultural power and self-congratulatory moral rhetoric of some people in countries long accustomed to telling other societies what to do and how to behave.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Country, Self, Long

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I certainly do have this feeling of affection for the absolute sense of intellectual freedom that exists as a live nerve, a live wire, right through the center of American life.

  Norman Mailer

  Freedom, Feelings, Intellectual

  "Mailer Tells a Lot. Not All, but a Lot.; His Longest Love Affair Is With the U.S." by Bernard Weinraub, www.nytimes.com. October 4, 2000.

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• In the general tendency toward specialization, philosophy too has established itself as a specialized discipline, one purified of all specific content. In so doing, philosophy has denied its own constitutive concept: the intellectual freedom that does not obey the dictates of specialized knowledge.

  Theodor Adorno

  Philosophy, Discipline, Intellectual

  Theodor W. Adorno (2012). “Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords”, p.6, Columbia University Press

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• In Europe, the Enlightenment of the 18th century was seen as a battle against the desire of the Church to limit intellectual freedom, a battle against the Inquisition, a battle against religious censorship. And the victory of the Enlightenment in Europe was seen as pushing religion away from the center of power. In America, at the same time, the Enlightenment meant coming to a country where people were not going to persecute you by reason of your religion. So it meant a liberation into religion. In Europe, it was liberation out of religion.

  Salman Rushdie

  Country, Religious, America

  "The Iconoclast". Interview with Shikha Dalmia, reason.org. August 1, 2005.

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• Religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.

  Philip Pullman

  Evil, Freedom Of Speech, Intellectual

  "Pullman defiant over US protests against Northern Lights" by Alison Flood, www.theguardian.com. September 29, 2008.

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• there are lots of would-be censors out there, and although they may have different agendas, they all want basically the same thing: for you to see the world they see...or to at least shut up about what you do see that's different. they are agents of the status quo. not necessarily bad guys, but dangerous guys if you happen to believe in intellectual freedom.

  Stephen King

  Believe, Guy, Intellectual

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• A delicate balance is required to combat violence perpetrated in the name of a religion, an ideology or an economic system, while also safeguarding religious freedom, intellectual freedom and individual freedoms. But there is another temptation which we must especially guard against: the simplistic reductionism which sees only good or evil; or, if you will, the righteous and sinners.

  Pope Francis

  Religious, Names, Evil

  Address to a Joint Meeting of the U.S. Congress, delivered 24 September 2015, Washington, D.C.

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• We must understand that when a society undermines intellectual freedom for its own purposes it is absolutely morally bad, but when it represses biological freedom for its own purposes it is absolutely morally good.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Intellectual, Purpose

  Robert M. Pirsig (1991). “LILA An Inquriry into Morals”

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• Intellectual freedom means the right to re-examine much that has been long taken for granted. A free man must be a reasoning man, and he must dare doubt what a legislative or electoral majority may most passionately assert.

  Robert H. Jackson

  Taken, Mean, Men

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• While we honour religion and believe it to be a powerful factor in elevating our race, we discriminate, as we hope our readers will also do, between it and dogmatism. Dogmatism has been the bane of civilization and a curse to mankind. It has degraded our sex, stifled intelligent inquiry, and persecuted every independent reformer and every noble cause.

  Tennessee Celeste Claflin

  Sex, Powerful, Believe

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• The problems of financing the universities and their intellectual freedom, threatened by political and bureaucratic interference, are problems which are invariant under the ism transformations: socialism, communism, capitalism, or any other ism or ology.

  Serge Lang

  Political, Intellectual, Isms

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• Men's minds must be free, and that means the minds of all, not the minds of a select few.

  Mary Barnett Gilson

  Mean, Men, Intellectual

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