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Free Thought Quotes

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Free Thought Quotes

“It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wreck and ruin without fail.”

PhilosophyEducationLearningCuriosityIndividualityInstructionInquiryEinsteinFree ThoughtTranslated Quotes
Book:Albert Einstein, Philosopher-Scientist
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“The matter on which I judge people is their willingness, or ability, to handle contradiction. Thus Paine was better than Burke when it came to the principle of the French revolution, but Burke did and said magnificent things when it came to Ireland, India and America. One of them was in some ways a revolutionary conservative and the other was a conservative revolutionary. It's important to try and contain multitudes. One of my influences was Dr Israel Shahak, a tremendously brave Israeli humanist who had no faith in collectivist change but took a Spinozist line on the importance of individuals. Gore Vidal's admirers, of whom I used to be one and to some extent remain one, hardly notice that his essential critique of America is based on Lindbergh and 'America First'—the most conservative position available. The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has—from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness.”

PoliticsUnited StatesInfluenceRevolutionIndiaHumanismIsraelContradictionIndividualismIrelandConservatismCollectivismFrench RevolutionPartisanshipRadicalismFree ThoughtThomas PaineSpinozismEdmund BurkeGore VidalAmerica First CommitteeCharles LindberghIsrael Shahak
Book:Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left
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“Darwin did not know what a bitter satire he wrote on mankind ... when he showed that free competition, the struggle for existence, which the economists celebrate as the highest historical achievement, is the normal state of the animal kingdom. Only conscious organization of social production, in which production and distribution are carried on in a planned way, can lift mankind above the rest of the animal.”

FreedomDemocracyRevolutionSocialismRadicalCommunismRadicalismFree ThoughtFree ThinkerEngelism
Author:Friedrich Engels
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“I am often described to my irritation as a 'contrarian' and even had the title inflicted on me by the publisher of one of my early books. (At least on that occasion I lived up to the title by ridiculing the word in my introduction to the book's first chapter.) It is actually a pity that our culture doesn't have a good vernacular word for an oppositionist or even for someone who tries to do his own thinking: the word 'dissident' can't be self-conferred because it is really a title of honor that has to be won or earned, while terms like 'gadfly' or 'maverick' are somehow trivial and condescending as well as over-full of self-regard. And I've lost count of the number of memoirs by old comrades or ex-comrades that have titles like 'Against the Stream,' 'Against the Current,' 'Minority of One,' 'Breaking Ranks' and so forth—all of them lending point to Harold Rosenberg's withering remark about 'the herd of independent minds.' Even when I was quite young I disliked being called a 'rebel': it seemed to make the patronizing suggestion that 'questioning authority' was part of a 'phase' through which I would naturally go. On the contrary, I was a relatively well-behaved and well-mannered boy, and chose my battles with some deliberation rather than just thinking with my hormones.”

YouthAuthorityIndependenceWordsRebellionDissentHormonesMemoirsDissidentsFree ThoughtContrarianismHonorificsHarold RosenbergOppositionism
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“...the intellectual is a person who nurtures, preserves and propagates independent judgment, a person loyal exclusively to truth, a courageous and wrathful individual for whom no force of this world is too great or too frightening not to be subjected to scrutiny and called to account. ... A true intellectual, a genuine one, is always an outsider, …he is a person who lives in self-imposed exile on the margins of society.”

SocietyIndependenceAuthenticityFree ThoughtIntellectuals
Book:Belladonna
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“Some Christian lawyers—some eminent and stupid judges—have said and still say, that the Ten Commandments are the foundation of all law. Nothing could be more absurd. Long before these commandments were given there were codes of laws in India and Egypt—laws against murder, perjury, larceny, adultery and fraud. Such laws are as old as human society; as old as the love of life; as old as industry; as the idea of prosperity; as old as human love. All of the Ten Commandments that are good were old; all that were new are foolish. If Jehovah had been civilized he would have left out the commandment about keeping the Sabbath, and in its place would have said: 'Thou shalt not enslave thy fellow-men.' He would have omitted the one about swearing, and said: 'The man shall have but one wife, and the woman but one husband.' He would have left out the one about graven images, and in its stead would have said: 'Thou shalt not wage wars of extermination, and thou shalt not unsheathe the sword except in self-defence.' If Jehovah had been civilized, how much grander the Ten Commandments would have been. All that we call progress—the enfranchisement of man, of labor, the substitution of imprisonment for death, of fine for imprisonment, the destruction of polygamy, the establishing of free speech, of the rights of conscience; in short, all that has tended to the development and civilization of man; all the results of investigation, observation, experience and free thought; all that man has accomplished for the benefit of man since the close of the Dark Ages—has been done in spite of the Old Testament.”

LoveLawProgressSocietyIndustryCivilizationConscienceIndiaMurderProsperityAbsurdFraudFree SpeechEgyptAdulteryDark AgesOld TestamentSabbathJehovahPolygamyTen CommandmentsLawyersFree ThoughtPerjuryJudgesLarceny
Book:About The Holy Bible
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“Language has been weaponized in modern societies not just to communicate but to control thought. Terms like “success,” “confidence,” “normal,” “mental health,” or “self-improvement” are presented as universally desirable, but these words are saturated with invisible assumptions. When people use these terms, they are not merely communicating ideas but also adhering to a predefined set of beliefs and norms. For example, to say one is “successful” is not simply to express achievement but to buy into the societal belief that success is tied to specific metrics like wealth or social status. To use such language is already to submit to the ideology behind it.”

ValuesLanguageThoughtIdeologyCensorshipNormMind ControlNormalityFree ThoughtNewspeak
Author:Sov8840
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“Reincarnation is an ancient myth, nothing more - it is the fairytale of the adults. And as long as it alleviates people's anxiety, it is an acceptable myth, but the moment it becomes an impediment to life, it turns deadly for the individual as well as the society.”

ProgressReasoningMysticismReincarnationMythsPrejudicesFree ThinkingFree ThoughtScience And Reasoning
Book:Every Generation Needs Caretakers: The Gospel of Patriotism
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“If only you become free, then you, my dear sister or brother, will give a truly liberated family environment to your child, and that child will give the same free environment to his or her child - and it will go on, and eventually make the world filled with enough conscientious free original human souls to outweigh all the negativity of the remaining tiny portion of second-hand humans - the real lesser humans.”

PhilosophyFreedomParentingBrainy QuotesFree ThinkingFree ThoughtTruth Life Lessons
Author:Abhijit Naskar
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“Every smallest step in the field of free thinking, and of the personally formed life, has ever been fought for at the cost of spiritual and physical tortures . . . change has required its innumerable martyrs. . . . Nothing has been bought more dearly than that little bit of human reason and sense of freedom that is now the basis of our pride.”

Free ThinkingFree ThoughtSelf Overcoming
Book:The Dawn of Day: Friedrich Nietzsche
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“The problem with the evangelical homeschool movement was not their desire to educate their children at home, or in private religious schools, but the evangelical impulse to "protect" children from ideas that might lead them to "question" and to keep them cloistered in what amounted to a series of one-family gated communities.”

Critical ThinkingEvangelicalHomeschoolFree ThoughtControlling ParentsReligious Right
Book:Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back
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“As a convinced atheist, I ought to agree with Voltaire that Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil. Without the stern, joyless rabbis and their 613 dour prohibitions, we might have avoided the whole nightmare of the Old Testament, and the brutal, crude wrenching of that into prophecy-derived Christianity, and the later plagiarism and mutation of Judaism and Christianity into the various rival forms of Islam. Much of the time, I do concur with Voltaire, but not without acknowledging that Judaism is dialectical. There is, after all, a specifically Jewish version of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with a specifically Jewish name—the Haskalah—for itself. The term derives from the word for 'mind' or 'intellect,' and it is naturally associated with ethics rather than rituals, life rather than prohibitions, and assimilation over 'exile' or 'return.' It's everlastingly linked to the name of the great German teacher Moses Mendelssohn, one of those conspicuous Jewish hunchbacks who so upset and embarrassed Isaiah Berlin. (The other way to upset or embarrass Berlin, I found, was to mention that he himself was a cousin of Menachem Schneerson, the 'messianic' Lubavitcher rebbe.) However, even pre-enlightenment Judaism forces its adherents to study and think, it reluctantly teaches them what others think, and it may even teach them how to think also.”

LifeReligionEvilEducationChristianityStudyAtheismReturnEnlightenmentEthicsIslamIntellectThoughtProphecyJudaismExileOld TestamentAssimilationPlagiarism18th CenturyDialecticsMonotheismFree ThoughtAntisemitismRitualsVoltaireGermansRabbisMessianismIsaiah BerlinProhibitionsChabad MessianismHaskalahMenachem Mendel SchneersonMoses MendelssohnRebbes
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“Sincere thought, real free thought, ready, in the name of superhuman authority or of humble common sense, to question the basis of what is officially taught and generally accepted, is less and less likely to thrive. It is, we repeat, by far easier to enslave a literate people than an illiterate one, strange as this may seem at first sight. And the enslavement is more likely to be lasting.”

PeopleFirstsMayRealSeemsNamesCommonTaughtStrangeReadyEasierAuthoritySightBasesHumbleAcceptedCommon SenseRepeatsThriveLastingSincereIlliterateEnslavementSuperhumanFree Thought
Book:The Lightning and the Sun
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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.”

BelieveHas BeensStatesAgeChoicesCoursesReadingI BelieveUnitedEducationKnowledgePracticeUnited StatesLearningStudentsCollegeParticularAuthorityContrarySufficientBranchesApplicationDestinedVocationExclusiveLecturesAcademyVaryHarvardQualificationsFree Thought
Book:Thomas Jefferson: A Chronology of His Thoughts
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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.”

WantFeelsMeanReasonOpportunityGrowsFreedomConditionsRespectConscienceProhibitionFree Thought
Book:Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer
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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.”

PeopleIdeasNationsCommonProjectsIntellectualWeakLogicSilentOppressionFeaturesPropagandaRegimesNew IdeasDistrustPersistentAlienationRelentlessAssertionAuthoritarianismIntimidationLightnessInconsistencyFree ThoughtDuetsStasisTotalitarian Regimes
Author:Aung San Suu Kyi
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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.”

ReasonScienceReligionIndividualReligiousPartyLibertyMoralVirtueCommunicationSpeechDiversityPhilosophicalPressesFruitPursuitRecognitionArtisticOppositionAssociationSkepticismOrganizeInquiryPublishDissentCivil LibertiesReligious FreedomFreedom Of The PressIndividual RightsFree PressFree ThoughtOpposition Parties
Book:In defense of secular humanism
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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.”

FirstsForceGoneAtheismMovementGoes OnPositive AtheismActiveOrthodoxNo RespectFree ThoughtNew Knowledge
Book:The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography
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