"Freedom of thought" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... works is still remembered and still read for its splendid English. That is Areopagitica, a passionate appeal for a free press. Milton desired that a man should have not only freedom of thought, but freedom to write down and print and publish these thoughts. But the rulers of England, ever since printing had been introduced, had thought otherwise, and by law no book could be printed until it had been licensed, and no man ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... class, they were timid — with good reason — and timidity, which is high wisdom in philosophy, sicklies the whole cast of thought in action. Numbers of these men haunted London society, all tending to free-thinking, but never venturing much freedom of thought. Like the anti-slavery doctrinaires of the forties and fifties, they became mute and useless when slavery struck them in the face. For type of these eccentrics, literature seems to have chosen Henry Reeve, at least to the extent of ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... progress, and freedom of thought must be grateful to Dr. J. R. Buchanan for his discovery of the science of SARCOGNOMY. His system brings us nearer to a recognition of the true nature of man, his origin and his destiny, and of the relations which he bears to ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... illustrious became the rule. In a land where freedom of speech was held to be an unquestioned right, freedom of thought ceased to exist, and men were ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... the individual, music cannot grow; without freedom of thought, neither the language of tones nor that of words can gain full, free utterance. Freedom is essential to the life of the indwelling spirit. Wherever the flow of thought and fancy is impeded, or the energies of the ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... laugh—even at her own expense. While the Bastille still frowns over France, the Inquisition and the Jesuits are an incubus upon Spain and Italy, while Germany is split up into little principalities, Dukedoms, Bishoprics, Palatinates, England has already won for herself the great boon of freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of religious and political opinion. The satirist could here find expression and appreciation. The birth of the pictorial satirist who is the subject of my first chapter coincides pretty closely with the creation of that Tale of a Tub, of which ...
— The Eighteenth Century in English Caricature • Selwyn Brinton
... people's." Probably no advocate of promiscuity, and no squirradical, was present at the performances of The Promise of May. But people of advanced minds had got it into their heads that their doctrines were to be attacked, so they went and made a hubbub in the sacred cause of freedom of thought and speech. The truth is, that controversial topics, political topics, ought not to be brought into plays, much less into sermons. Tennyson meant Edgar for "nothing thorough, nothing sincere." He is that venomous thing, the prig-scoundrel: he does not suit the ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... short as it had been. And in countries where what was by the dominant sect insolently styled tolerance succeeded in establishing itself, it was possible to maintain the tolerated doctrines with a more or less complete freedom. So there arose in Europe a sort of freedom of thought, not for men, but for Christians; and, 'if we except France, it is only for Christians that it exists anywhere else at the present day,' a limitation which has now fortunately ceased to be ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... see not, ears that hear not our prayers, and a heart like the nether millstone. We have this day restored the Sovereign, to whom alone men ought to be obedient. He reigns in heaven, and with a propitious eye beholds His subjects assuming that freedom of thought and dignity of self-direction which He bestowed on them. From the rising to the setting ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... Restoration, bringing to him greater personal freedom of thought and speech, came the most active period of Evelyn's literary production. His loyalty at once found opportunity to answer a libel on King Charles (entitled News from Brussels) in The late News from Brussels unmasked, a long ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... private life, preserving my own self-respect and manhood, to abject and servile submission to executive will. If the alternative be private life or servile obedience to executive will, I am prepared to retire. Official position has no charms for me when deprived of that freedom of thought and action which becomes a gentleman ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... Irishman and the first man in Europe who preached the freedom of thought was Collins. Two hundred years ago. He denounced priestcraft, the philosopher of Middlesex. Three ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... the colored men is one of the results growing out of those conditions, which would not and could not exist if there were absolute freedom of thought and action in political matters among the white people. The only part that the so-called Race Question plays in this business is that it is used as a pretext to justify the coercive and proscriptive methods thus used. ...
— The Facts of Reconstruction • John R. Lynch
... the Renaissance; and it was essentially a new creation, and not a revival. Hitherto the tribe, the city, the nation, the guild, or the church, had been the source of authority, the centre of power, and the giver of life. Although Greece showed a desire for freedom of thought, and a tendency to recognize the worth of the individual and his capacity as a discoverer and transmitter of truth, it did not set the individual mind free from bondage to the social and political power of the city. Socrates and Plato saw somewhat of the real ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... between Count Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. In the former we see an absence of conservatism and devotion to tradition. His attitude towards all doctrines is that of unconditional freedom of thought, and subjecting them to daring criticism, he chooses from among them only that which is in harmony with the inspirations of his own reason. He is a genuine individualist, to his very marrow. By the masses of the ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... inseparable from Gothic blood being thus forced out of its natural channels of freedom of thought and municipal liberty, it remained in the cavaliers of the army of Spain in the same barbarous form which it had held in the Northern forests,—a physical self-esteem and a readiness to fight on the slightest ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... political parties are dangerous to any nation, no matter how pure or how patriotic the motives and principles which first bring them together. No political party can or ought to exist when one of its corner-stones is opposition to freedom of thought and to the right to worship God "according to the dictate of one's own conscience," or according to the creed of any religious denomination whatever. Nevertheless, if a sect sets up its laws as binding above the State laws, wherever the two come ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant
... should not take their place by the side of Observatory routine. I have often felt the desire practically to refresh my acquaintance with what were once favourite subjects: Lunar Theory and Physical Optics. But I do not at present clearly see how I can enter upon them with that degree of freedom of thought which is necessary for success ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... invoke the strong spirit of Diogenes whose sturdy freedom of thought was like that of Walt Whitman, to cooperate in the review of modern life. Such men are greatly needed to review a corrupt civilization; and where is the civilization now, where was there ever a civilization that was not corrupt? ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... conscience, a man must himself be unprejudiced and well informed. He must strive, not to keep up an unhealthy excitement which shall make conscience introspective and morbid, but to preserve a sane moral outlook, to encourage freedom of thought and judgment, and to develop a normal conscience which reacts promptly against wrong. Conscience measures our inner recoil from evil. The power of a preacher is in direct proportion to the energy with which he reveals sin ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... to bestow; but, with Horace's fondness for the country, it had a value for him beyond all price. It gave him a competency—satis superque—enough and more than he wanted for his needs. It gave him leisure, health, amusement; and, more precious than all, it secured him undisturbed freedom of thought, and opportunities for that calm intercourse with nature which he "needed for his spirit's health." Never was gift better bestowed, or more worthily requited. To it we are indebted for much of that poetry which has linked the name of Maecenas ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... thought contending in our age, two are conspicuously opposed. The one says: Liberty is an end not a mere means in itself; apart from practical results the crown of life. Freedom of thought and its expression, and freedom of action, bounded only by the equal claim of our fellows, are desirable for their own sakes as constituting national vitality: and even when, as is sometimes the case, Liberty sets itself against improvements for a time, it ultimately accomplishes ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... no more brilliant circle than this in any of our cities. There was none where so much freedom of thought was united to so much scholarship. The "Anthology" was the literary precursor of the "North American Review," and the theological herald of the "Christian Examiner." Like all first beginnings it showed many marks of immaturity. It mingled extracts and original contributions, theology and medicine, ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... fellow-workers claimed now, for the first time, an equality with the two old estates of the realm. If this national struggle took at first an aspect chiefly religious, it was because the German nation had freedom of thought and of belief more at heart than political freedom. But political rights also were soon demanded, and demanded with such violence, that during his own life-time Luther had to repress the excesses of enthusiastic theorists and of a violent peasantry. ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... corporeal bruises he now bore away another ineffaceable mental impression. Were the Italian patriots justified in their hostility toward the Vatican? Had United Italy come into existence with the support of the Papacy, or in despite of it? Would the Church forever set herself against freedom of thought? Always seek to imprison the human mind? Was her unreasonably stubborn attitude directly accountable for the presence of atheism in the place, of all places, where her own influence ought to be most potent, the city ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... well aware of this psychology, and have fought constantly the spread of Freethought literature to the masses. Professor Bury, in his "History of Freedom of Thought," speaking of England, tells us, "If we take the cases in which the civil authorities have intervened to repress the publication of unorthodox opinions during the last two centuries, we find that the object has always been to prevent ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... with years, had been doing at the court of Versailles a work hardly less important than that of Washington on the battlefields of America. By the simple grace and dignity of his manners, by his large good sense and freedom of thought, by his fame as a scientific discoverer, above all by his consummate tact in the management of men, the whilom printer, king's postmaster-general for America, discoverer, London colonial agent, delegate in the Continental Congress, and signer of the Declaration ...
— History of the United States, Volume 2 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... this bitter disappointment was led by the eager German youth, who, inspired by liberal ideals, now thirsted for freedom of thought, of speech, and of action. Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, a German patriot, organized everywhere Turnvereine, or gymnastic clubs, as a tangible form of expressing this demand. Among the students of the universities liberal patriotic clubs called Burschenschaften were organized, idealistic in their ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... shockingly that Christendom to which the Ghetto had imagined him apostatizing: he had fearlessly contradicted every system of the century, the ruling Cartesian philosophy no less than the creed of the Church, and his plea for freedom of thought had illustrated it to the full. True, the Low Countries, when freed from the Spanish rack, had nobly declared for religious freedom, but at a scientific treatment of the Bible as sacred literature even Dutch toleration must draw the line, unbeguiled by the appeal ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... of such Shrines come home with deep interest to all hearts—all English hearts—particularly when they are done with the earnestness which distinguishes Mrs. Hall's writings. That lady's earnestness and enthusiasm are of the right sort—felt for freedom of thought and action, for taste, and for genius winging its flight in a noble direction. They are displayed, oftentimes most naturally, throughout the ...
— Emilie the Peacemaker • Mrs. Thomas Geldart
... 69. A History of Freedom of Thought. By JOHN B. BURY, M.A., LL.D., Regius Professor of Modern History in Cambridge University. Summarizes the history of the long struggle between authority and reason and of the emergence of the principle that coercion of opinion is ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... you are coming to the point, Dr. Socrates!" said Constantin Marc. "You renounce progress, the new justice, the peace of the world, freedom of thought; you submit to tradition. You consent to the ancient error, the good old-fashioned ignorance, the venerable iniquity of our forbears. You withdraw into the French tradition, you submit to ancient custom, to the ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... to select one half of those thus recommended. Now we must consider numerous provisional laws relating to liberty of conscience, provision for the poor, choice of civil officers, and so on, which can be in force until accepted by the council. We shall thus, dear friend, I trust, have secured freedom of thought, the sacredness of person and property, popular control over all powers of the state; and we will leave our new democracy to develop itself in accordance with its own genius, unencumbered with useless formalities ...
— A True Hero - A Story of the Days of William Penn • W.H.G. Kingston
... results often far from good. They revived the study of Latin and Greek classics, extracted manuscripts from their hidden archives, incited in society a passion for learning, and created a popular literature in their own vernacular. They implanted a love of freedom of thought in the Italian masses. Their enthusiasm for the new learning attracted scholars from Germany, France, and other countries, who spread the influence ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... as yet a name, and a hardship seldom heard of and never felt. Perfect freedom of thought in all the various relations of life exists; there is no ecclesiastical domination; no tithes. The people know all this, and are not misled by the furious rhodomontades of party-spirit about rectories, inquisitorial powers, family compacts, and a universal desire for democratic ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... the empress Catherine. Byron was as little of a philosopher as Peter the Great: both were instances of that rare and useful, but unedifying variation, an energetic genius born without the prejudices or superstitions of his contemporaries. The resultant unscrupulous freedom of thought made Byron a greater poet than Wordsworth just as it made Peter a greater king than George III; but as it was, after all, only a negative qualification, it did not prevent Peter from being an appalling blackguard and an arrant poltroon, nor did ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... son of Jonathan Corwin, was born May 21, 1683, and graduated at Harvard College in 1701. Mr. Barnard, of Marblehead, describes his character: "The spirit of early devotion, accompanied with a natural freedom of thought and easy elocution, a quick invention, a solid judgment, and a tenacious memory, laid the foundation of a good preacher; to which his acquired literature, his great reading, hard studies, deep meditation, and close walk with God, rendered him an ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... of human infirmity in their mutual intercourse by the merit of their common achievements. Each by turn could claim pre-eminence in the contest of sanctity and learning. In the schools of science England has no name to rival Erigena in originality, or St. Virgil in freedom of thought; nor (among its canonised women) any saintly virgin to compare with St. Bridget; nor, although it has 150 saints in its calendar, can it pretend to equal that Irish multitude which the Book of Life alone is large enough to contain. Nor can Ireland, on the other hand, boast of ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... of the average farce are so elemental that in the matter of its setting there is small need to worry about geographical or ethnical considerations. Of course, if its locale is French you may have to modify its freedom of thought and speech, but with a very little accommodation to national proprieties you can either transplant the setting of your play or you can leave it where it was and make use of the convention that for stage purposes all Frenchmen have a perfect command of our tongue and idiom. But to take a frankly ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 25th, 1920 • Various
... morally an evil—it accustoms the religious public to logical distortions, and it nourishes a disingenuousness that easily becomes immoral. The belief that a sacred book is final authority often results in limitation of freedom of thought—certain things are excluded from discussion. The instinctive demand for freedom asserts itself, however, in various ways: sometimes, as described above, a desired sense is obtained by violence; sometimes a religious body that is regarded by ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... are themselves good, freedom of thought will give us the best. Why should we protect inferior illusions against the discovery of the superior? The unfettered march of the intellect may improve the quality of our illusions as illusions, while also strengthening their foundations. If religion be a good thing, the best religion ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... art, because it can increase liberty, and in a liberal atmosphere art thrives. Even politicians can do something. They can repeal censorious laws and abolish restrictions on freedom of thought and speech and conduct. They can protect minorities. They can defend originality from the hatred of the mediocre mob. They can make an end of the doctrine that the State has a right to crush unpopular opinions in the interests of public order. A mighty liberty to be allowed ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... Virginia was founded and developed as a cross-section of the whole life of the British Isles, with its evil as well as its good; with ideals of freedom of thought which made no attempt to control a man's conscience; and with an ever growing concept of self-government and human freedom as already developed during nearly a thousand years and set out by the common law and the statute law of the race. ...
— Religious Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century - The Faith of Our Fathers • George MacLaren Brydon
... with a fair share of common-sense, and not more than a fair share of vanity, will identify either contemporary or posthumous fame with the highest good; and Priestley's life leaves no doubt that he, at any rate, set a much higher value upon the advancement of knowledge, and the promotion of that freedom of thought which is at once the cause and the ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... modified the ferocity of unchecked individualism, it tended, in the course of time, to generate a servile humility fatal to the largest and freest personal development. In the interests of passive obedience, it suppressed freedom of thought and action. Obedience became mechanical and unreasoning. The consequence was that the passion for individual liberty was unduly restrained, and the extravagant claims of political and ecclesiastical tyrants ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... more inspired by political feelings than men supposed, a peculiarity which we do not find among his contemporaries, and we can now see for the first time what he meant in sketching the duo-despotism in Emilia Galotti. He was regarded then as a champion of freedom of thought and against clerical intolerance; for his theological writings were better understood. The fragments On the Education of the Human Race, which Eugene Rodrigue has translated into French, may give ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... when the latter bill passed, the abolitionists were taunted by Gladstone, the great Demerara slaveholder, with having toiled for forty years and done nothing. The Roman Catholic relief bill, establishing freedom of thought in England, had the same experience. It passed in 1829 by a majority of a hundred and three in the House of Lords, which had nine months before refused by a majority of forty-five to take ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... this reliance on the unaided human reason as a means of obtaining knowledge did not meet with approval, and Abelard's views were condemned as unsound. Abelard, indeed, was a man in advance of his age. Freedom of thought had to wait many centuries before ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... common antipathy to sacerdotalism brought the two parties together in some directions, and the Protestant theory of the right of private judgment was in substance a narrower version of the rationalist demand for freedom of thought. Protestantism in one aspect is simply rationalism still running about with the shell on its head. This gives no doubt one secret of the decay of the evangelical party. The Protestant demand for a rational basis of faith widened among men of any intellectual force into an inquiry about the authority ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... gentlemen and of scholars; in a society where emulation without envy, ambition without jealousy, contention without animosity, incited industry, and awakened genius; where a liberal pursuit of knowledge, and a genuine freedom of thought, were raised, encouraged, and pushed forward by example, by commendation, and by authority. I breathed the same atmosphere that the HOOKERS, the CHILLINGWORTHS, and the LOCKES had breathed before; ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... start—an anti-Scholastic character. If up to this time Church dogma had ruled unchallenged in spiritual affairs, and the Aristotelian philosophy in things temporal, war is now declared against authority of every sort and freedom of thought is inscribed on the banner.[1] "Modern philosophy is Protestantism in the sphere of the thinking spirit" (Erdmann). Not that which has been considered true for centuries, not that which another says, ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... in the consular service and Thoreau was in no one's service—or that the War Governor of Massachusetts was a greater patriot than Wendell Phillips, who was ashamed of all political parties. Hawthorne's art was true and typically American—as is the art of all men living in America who believe in freedom of thought and who live wholesome lives to prove it, whatever their means ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... very contrary direction to those who have the means and opportunities the others want. Far from advising them to submit to this mental bondage, she will advise them to employ their whole industry to exert the utmost freedom of thought, and to rest on no authority but hers—that is, their own. She will speak to them in the language of the Soufys, a sect of philosophers in Persia that travellers have mentioned. "Doubt," say these wise and honest freethinkers, "is ...
— Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope • Lord Bolingbroke
... shield and nursery of individual freedom of thought and action. The young citizen who has never dreamed of a political career becomes interested in some local question affecting his individual interests. A bridge is out of repair; a roadmaster has failed to perform his duty; a constable has ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... position, to be shot at by all dark, unenlightened human beings who may have peculiar motives for restraining the progress of mind; but it is as absurd in this glorious nineteenth century to attempt to destroy freedom of thought and the sovereignty of the individual, as it is to ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... system can give expression to their sentiments. Before long, however, I fear that they will be prohibited, or those who sing them will be marked as suspected. Alas, alas! our lovely France will be deprived of all freedom of thought, opinion, and action." ...
— Villegagnon - A Tale of the Huguenot Persecution • W.H.G. Kingston
... to us absolutely. Thinkest Thou we shall be right or still lying? They will convince themselves of our rightness, for they will see what a depth of degrading slavery and strife that liberty of Thine has led them into. Liberty, Freedom of Thought and Conscience, and Science will lead them into such impassable chasms, place them face to face before such wonders and insoluble mysteries, that some of them—more rebellious and ferocious than the ...
— "The Grand Inquisitor" by Feodor Dostoevsky • Feodor Dostoevsky
... wrote an account of those transactions, which was too plain and just to be published in those unhappy times, but has been printed since; and which cannot be read without feeling sentiments of esteem for a man, who indulged a freedom of thought becoming a Christian and philosopher. He, from the beginning, opposed the prejudices of the people, the proceedings of the Court, and the perverse zeal of those Ministers of the Gospel, who, by their preaching and conduct, caused ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... consider the truth and error in the Protestant principle of justification by faith. Our purpose here is to show that the truth in Orthodoxy is identical with the truth in Protestantism. Both place, as the root of all religion, an individual personal sight of God and truth. To this, freedom of thought is an essential means. Right thinking involves free thinking. If to know the truth makes us free, freedom, again, is the condition of knowing the truth. Protestantism and Orthodoxy have often attempted ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... Booth is a notable example) is their insistence that the noblest virtues, if displayed by those who reject their pitiable formulae, are, as their pet phrase goes, "splendid sins." But there is, perhaps, one step lower; and that is that men, who profess freedom of thought, should fail to see and [192] appreciate that large soul of goodness which often animates even the fanatical adherents of such tenets. I am sorry for any man who can read the epistles to the Galatians and the Corinthians without ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... theological faculty appeared to him futile and unsatisfactory. He had definitely resolved upon the secular life for himself; and although that did not mean that his convictions were shaken, or that his faith was in any way less precious to him, it gave to him a certain sense of elasticity and freedom of thought and spirit. ...
— For the Faith • Evelyn Everett-Green
... that philosophical freedom of thought which discovers itself in all the works of Voltaire, but more particularly in those ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... gave England Miles Coverdale's Bible, who freed her from the yoke that oppressed France till the Revolution, and oppresses Spain to-day. Froude's first four volumes are an eloquent indictment of Ultramontanism, a plea for the Reformation, a sustained argument for English liberties and freedom of thought. No such book can be impartial in the sense of admitting that there is as much to be said on one side as on the other. Froude replied to The Edinburgh Review in Fraser's Magazine for September, 1858, and in the following month the reviewer retorted. He did not really shake the ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... Amendments to the Federal Constitution, Appendix. Consult also the Bill of Rights in the constitution of your state.] From the beginning of our national history a fundamental principle of American government has been to allow the individual as much freedom of thought and action as is ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... Marquis de Lafayette and other Frenchmen entered their army. So too did the Poles, Kosciusko and Pulaski, and the Germans, Kalb and Steuben. In December Franklin went over to Paris. The philosophic movement was then at its height in France. The philosophes desired freedom of thought in religion, constitutional liberty, and the abolition of privilege of all kinds. They speculated as to the origins of political and social institutions and the laws of human progress. The works of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu were eagerly studied by the nobles and fine ladies of the ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... political discussions. At all events, this argument is unworthy of notice at all unless we are to push it to its logical conclusion, and, for the sake of peace in the family, to prohibit woman absolutely the exercise of freedom of thought and speech. Men live with their countrymen and disagree with them in politics, religion, and ten thousand of the affairs of life, as often the trifling as the important. What harm, then, if woman be allowed her thought and vote upon ...
— Debate On Woman Suffrage In The Senate Of The United States, - 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, And January 25, 1887 • Henry W. Blair, J.E. Brown, J.N. Dolph, G.G. Vest, Geo. F. Hoar.
... that discipline is nearest perfect which assures to the individual the greatest freedom of thought and action while at all times promoting his feeling of responsibility toward the group. These twin ends are convergent and interdependent for the exact converse of the reason that it is impossible for any man to feel happy and successful ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... legislation, because they are really admonitions, religious exhortations, addressed not to ecclesiastics alone, but to the faithful, the Christian people in general, and notably characterized by good sense, and, one might almost say, freedom of thought. ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... It is vacant now. Boston prefers theology to religion, but it is growing slowly, and there are pulpits that are slowly approaching the unsectarian position—very slowly; while the Rev. Mr. J. Savage displays a refreshing freedom of thought, and has been more successful than any other clergyman in carrying a large congregation with him, a solitary specimen of a successful though unsectarian teacher ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various
... of chivalry in religion—the age of St. Louis, of Francis and Dominic, of Bonaventura and Thomas Aquinas. It was a vast revival, bearing fruit in a new ardour of pity and charity, as well as in a healthy freedom of thought. The Church, in recognising the new charitable orders of Francis and Dominic, and the Christianised Aristotelianism of the schoolmen, retained the loyalty and profited by the zeal of the more sober reformers, but was unable to prevent the diffusion of an independent critical spirit, ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... as much to other prelates whom he had just convoked to the Council. It is a serious case for absolute power when it enters into a struggle with the most noble sentiments of human nature. The Emperor Napoleon had come to that point when he regarded as his enemies freedom of thought and freedom of conscience amongst his subjects still suspected of ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... of the principal benefits of a familiar intercourse with Greece and Rome, the knowledge of antiquity, the purity of taste, and the freedom of thought. Confident in the riches of their native tongue, the Arabians disdained the study of any foreign idiom. The Greek interpreters were chosen among their Christian subjects; they formed their translations, sometimes on the original text, more frequently ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... astonishing in the lower races and in the less educated classes, but it would be difficult to point out a single case in history where a new doctrine has not been met with bitter resistance. We justly regard learning and freedom of thought and investigation as precious, and we popularly think of Luther and the Reformation as standing at the beginning of the movement toward these, but Luther himself had no faith in 'the light of reason' and he hated as heartily as any papal dogmatist the 'new ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... consistent application of their principles. There is almost sure to be some region of inquiry which they regard as so dangerous that they regret that any one should enter upon it. Sometimes it is said that freedom of thought, though admirable in politics, is mischievous in theology: some, advancing what they believe to be one step further, express a general approbation of freedom of thought, but stigmatize free-thinkers. Again, it may be not infrequently ...
— John Stuart Mill; His Life and Works • Herbert Spencer, Henry Fawcett, Frederic Harrison and Other
... characterised by considerable freedom of thought and utterance is evident from other sources, as when the gifted young barrister of Bury St. Edmunds (Henry Crabb Robinson) {31} by his outspoken sentiments in one of the debates, and admitted leanings to Godwin's philosophy, brought down the reproof from the great Robert Hall upon his friend ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... excluded from the sect, as he who disregards the social code, though not immoral, is ostracized from society. This led him to the logical conclusion that every Jew must comply with the customs of his people, though his opinion as to their moral value may differ from that of the rest. He believed in freedom of thought, but would not concede freedom of action or even of expression, and would say with Bolingbroke, "Freedom belongs to a man as a rational creature, he lies under the restraint ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... against the world," said he, "I would not exchange my freedom of thought for a throne." And again: "He who wishes not to be a despot, or a slave, may ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... the order of events are of little importance. It occurred to me in the connection, that to give a human document of Puritan family life, and the development of a mind from the archaic severity of New England Puritanism to a complete freedom of thought, by a purely evolutionary process, without revolt or revulsion, might be worth doing. For what it is worth I have done it without much consideration of my own dignity, and, candidly, not as to my blunders and peccadilloes, which are of no importance ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... not having vigour of mind enough boldly to throw off vulgar prejudices, and dare be wiser than the multitude, persuade themselves that what so many have acknowledged must be true. But I call on those who boast their philosophical freedom of thought, and would fain tread in the steps of Hume and other inquirers of the like exalted and speculative genius, to follow up fairly and fully their own principles, and, throwing off the shackles of authority, to examine carefully the evidence ...
— Historic Doubts Relative To Napoleon Buonaparte • Richard Whately
... swinging his glasses on this and that arroyo and singling out the infrequent clumps of greasewood for a touch of brighter color in their shadows. He urged his pony from crest to crest, carelessly easy in the saddle, alive to his work, and quietly happy in the lone freedom of thought ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... old sculptors: examine once more those ugly goblins, and formless monsters, and stern statues, anatomiless and rigid; but do not mock at them, for they are signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought, and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no charters, no charities can secure; but which it must be the first aim of all Europe at this day to regain ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... evidence except they are predisposed in the direction of that evidence. If it be said, "they should have thought for themselves," I answer—To think with their head was no bad sign that they did think for themselves. A great deal of what is called freedom of thought is merely the self-assertion which would persuade itself of a freedom it would possess but cannot without an effort too painful for ignorance and self-indulgence. The man would feel free without being free. To assert one's individuality is not necessarily to be free: it may indeed be but the ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... Genesis, and of the Scripture generally, the hopeless contradictions between the Evangelists, &c., &c. They hold the same language about our having outlived the Faith, ('Traditional Christianity,' as it is called;) the impossibility of freedom of thought; the necessity of providing some new Religious system; the effete nature of Creeds and formularies of Belief; the advance in Natural Science as likely to prove fatal ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... want to go there for? You'll only be a glorified schoolboy. Why don't you matriculate here? A year's no good. Spend five years here. You know, there are two good things in life, freedom of thought and freedom of action. In France you get freedom of action: you can do what you like and nobody bothers, but you must think like everybody else. In Germany you must do what everybody else does, but you may think as you ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... which recommends it to my mind. And thus I am brought to speak of the Church's infallibility, as a provision, adapted by the mercy of the Creator, to preserve religion in the world, and to restrain that freedom of thought, which of course in itself is one of the greatest of our natural gifts, and to rescue it from its own suicidal excesses. And let it be observed that, neither here nor in what follows, shall I have occasion to speak directly of Revelation in its subject-matter, ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... begotten in Envy and Jealousie, keeps me here a prisoner. Last night I was Basely arrested by Servile Hands for that Freedom of Thought and Expression for which I have already Sacrifized so much—aye all that Man hath but Love and Honour. But the End is Near. When for the Maintenance of Power, the Liberties of the Peoples are subdued by Martial Supremacy and the Dictates of Ambition ...
— Thankful Blossom • Bret Harte
... of the "Constitution" of the United States to set forth therein the will of God, and his commands was wise and farseeing. It has raised up a barrier against the encroachments of every form of popular religion and has given a semblance to freedom of thought and speech. ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... are the least open to conversion, because, in the scientific sense, the "educated" classes retain complexes, and hence are the least prepared to cope with the world as it is today. The German system, which has been bent upon installing authoritative conviction instead of encouraging freedom of thought, should be ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... adverb. 'Well, but, Tyndall,' he said, 'I am humble; and still it would be a great mistake to think that I am not also proud.' This duality ran through his character. A democrat in his defiance of all authority which unfairly limited his freedom of thought, and still ready to stoop in reverence to all that was really worthy of reverence, in the customs of the world ...
— Faraday As A Discoverer • John Tyndall
... the Arabs no trace remains. The names of Averroes and Almaimon, of Al Abbas and Ben Husa are quite unknown. Fez, once the Athens of Africa, the cradle of the sciences, is now a mere commercial caravansary. Its universities have vanished, its library is almost empty. Freedom of thought has been killed by the Koran, freedom of living by bad government. But Mr. Stutfield is not without hopes for the future. So far from agreeing with Lord Salisbury that 'Morocco may go her own way,' he strongly supports Captain Warren's proposition that ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... started from the Cocceian principle of freedom of thought. In his inaugural address, he announced it as his opinion, that Scriptures cannot be interpreted in any safe way except by the dictates of reason; that reason is the grand instrument by which we arrive at a knowledge of all truth; and that it is the great ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... held within the pale of the Church; many broad church clergymen rejected these as decidedly as I did myself, and yet remained members of the Establishment; the judgment on "Essays and Reviews" gave this wide liberty to heresy within the Church, and a laywoman might well claim the freedom of thought legally bestowed on divines. The name "Christian" might well be worn while Christ was worshipped as God, and obeyed as the "Revealer of the Father's will", the "well-beloved Son", the "Savior and Lord of men". But once challenge that unique position, ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... evolution, and socialism. Sharp and sudden was the transition from rabbinic scholasticism and soporific hasidic mysticism to this new world of ideas, flooded with the light of science, to these new revelations announcing the glad tidings of the freedom of thought, of the demolition of all traditional fetters, of the annihilation of all religious and national barriers, of the brotherhood of all mankind. The Jewish youth began to shatter the old idols, disregarding the outcry of the masses that had bowed down before them. A tragic war ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... of mind, the combination of perfect freedom of thought with full recognition of the legal obligations of the State and its citizens in matters of religion, is not difficult for any one to understand who is acquainted with the nature of the ius divinum and the priesthood administering ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... they possess, to protect the colored race against all dangers in respect to the fair expression of their wills at the polls, which they may apprehend may result from fraud, intimidation or "bull dozing," on the part of the whites. And as there can be no liberty of action without freedom of thought, they demand that all elections shall be fair and free and that no repressive measure shall be employed by the colored people to deprive their own race of any part of the fullest freedom in the exercise of the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... inevitably as all the long chain of Caucasus could have done. Yes, young man, in doing and suffering, we play but the part allotted by Destiny, the manager of this strange drama, stand bound to act no more than is prescribed, to say no more than is set down for us; and yet we mouth about free-will and freedom of thought and action, as if Richard must not die, or Richmond conquer, exactly where the Author has decreed ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... no doubt, with the belief that his outspoken skepticism was the cause of this lack of advancement, and that he was in some sort a martyr to freedom of thought; but one may be excused for discrediting this in the face of so many contrary instances. Capable men are too scarce to throw aside for such things in this century. The real and sufficient reason was his equally outspoken ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... MS., cap. 44.—Torquemada waged war upon freedom of thought, in every form. In 1490, he caused several Hebrew Bibles to be publicly burnt, and some time after, more than 6000 volumes of Oriental learning, on the imputation of Judaism, sorcery, or heresy, at the autos da ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... and support, and each was persecuted by the monopolistic sects and factions sure to get authority in the absence of some general temporal control, which is absolutely necessary for the purpose of protecting freedom of thought, of expression, and of action. From Homer's chieftain, Virgil's emperor, Goethe's duke, on to the end of the list, we owe all they have done for us to the temporal governments of their time, with a possible exception of Spencer, more apparent than real. Even the Roman Pilate (if we ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... germ, to literature, and mundane studies. How difficult it is to take a side in this battle, where both parties had one foot on firm ground, the other in chaos, where freedom, or what was to become freedom of thought, was allied with narrow bigotry, where ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... (May,) 1838. The fire-scathed ruin of this building yet stands a conspicuous token that the principles of true liberty, though loudly vaunted, are neither understood nor enjoyed in this Capital of a free republic. If freedom of thought, of speech, of the press, and the right of petition had been realities in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Hall would have been yet standing. Samuel Webb has since taken the chief labor of an appeal to the legal tribunals ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... inextricable. The military and naval authorities of the Entente foment and encourage in the country a revolution and armed sedition, and they favour by every means the {124} Salonica movement by continuing the vexatious measures and restricting all freedom of thought and action. The Entente Ministers paralyze all Government. Thus the country is ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott |
