"Freethinker" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... religion only because it involves them in a common opposition to the official religion and consequently in a common doom. Androcles is a humanitarian naturalist, whose views surprise everybody. Lavinia, a clever and fearless freethinker, shocks the Pauline Ferrovius, who is comparatively stupid and conscience ridden. Spintho, the blackguardly debauchee, is presented as one of the typical Christians of that period on the authority of St. Augustine, who seems to have come to the conclusion at one period of his ...
— Androcles and the Lion • George Bernard Shaw
... an unfair advantage of this alleged necessity of fate to employ it in excuse for our vices and our libertinism. I have often heard it said by smart young persons, who wished to play the freethinker, that it is useless to preach virtue, to censure vice, to create hopes of reward and fears of punishment, since it may be said of the book of destiny, that what is written is written, and that our behaviour can change nothing therein. Thus, ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... my friends," he said. Then, with sudden inspiration and renewed energy, "I hear the voice of a freethinker. Show me the face of a freethinker," he yelled, glaring round like a hunted, hungry man. "Show me the face of a freethinker, and I'll tell you what ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... and independence of character (qualities which made him refuse, in a Protestant country, to make open abjuration of the creed in which the Rossettis had been reared, though he detested the Pope and all his works, and was, if not an actual freethinker, thoroughly latitudinarian)—Gabriel’s pictures of this poet and father of poets were so vivid—so amazingly and incredibly vivid—that I find it difficult to think I never met the father in the flesh: not unfrequently I find myself talking of him as if I had ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... the only right of speech, and that those who experience have no right to say out that which they know to be true. It is the danger which dogs the steps of Freethought everywhere. You can see it in France at the present time, where the Freethinker, smarting against the oppression of the Church, tries to silence the Church, as he has been silenced in the past; but it is a bad reaction, and we cannot have that within the Society—there must be liberty for all. I ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
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