"Free-thinking" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bad to worse, as is their habit, and Italian life in the sixteenth century shows an increasing corruption and a laxity in public morals which were but the natural result of the free-thinking Renaissance. The Church had completely lost its influence as the spiritual head of Europe, and had become but a hypocritical principality, greedy for temporal power, and openly trafficking in ecclesiastical offices which were once supposed to belong by right to men of saintly ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... men, the whilom printer, king's postmaster-general for America, discoverer, London colonial agent, delegate in the Continental Congress, and signer of the Declaration of Independence, had completely captivated elegant, free-thinking France. Learned and common folk, the sober and the frivolous alike, swore by Franklin. Snuff-boxes, furniture, dishes, even stoves, were gotten up a la Franklin. The old man's portrait was in every house. That ...
— History of the United States, Volume 2 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... he was sent to a school at Vauxhall kept by Peter Annet (1693-1769), the last of the Deists who (in 1763) was imprisoned for a blasphemous libel. The elder Stephen was then living at Lambeth, and the choice of a schoolmaster seems to show that his opinions were of the free-thinking type. About 1767 the boy was sent to a school near his mother's family at Poole. There at the early age of ten he fell desperately in love with his schoolmaster's daughter, aged fifteen, and was hurt by the levity with which his passion was ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... untamed, unmanageable, heterodox nature of Runciman's art pertained to his life generally. Gay, free-thinking, prankish—with a tendency to late-houred habits that must have often scandalized his landlady—and a talent for conversation rare amongst artists, who, as a rule, express their thoughts better by their brushes than by word of mouth; kind-hearted, sociable, ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... the whole world. You hate those who have faith, because faith is an expression of ignorance and lack of culture, and at the same time you hate those who have no faith for having no faith and no ideals; you hate old people for being conservative and behind the times, and young people for free-thinking. The interests of the peasantry and of Russia are dear to you, and so you hate the peasants because you suspect every one of them of being a thief and a robber. You hate every one. You are just, and always take your stand on your legal rights, and so you are always at law with the ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... aims of social democracy. This reproach is wholly unjustified. The application of philosophical principles to the practical conditions of life, and in particular to social and political questions, can be made in the most various ways. Political "free-thinking," so called, has nothing whatever to do with the "freedom of thought" of our monistic natural religion. Moreover, I am convinced that the rational morality of monistic religion is in no way contrary to the good and truly valuable elements ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... of arguing upon the subject. These arguers they call Free-thinkers, and this appellation has obtained, in the understanding of pious believers, the most odious disgrace. Yet we cannot argue without thinking; nor can we either think or argue to any purpose without freedom. Therefore free-thinking, so far from being a disgrace, is a virtue, a most commendable quality. How absurd, and how cruel it is in the professors of divinity, to address the understanding of men on the subject of their belief, and to upbraid those very men who shall exercise their understanding ...
— Answer to Dr. Priestley's Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever • Matthew Turner
... by intelligent enthusiasm. Such a disposition is manifest in the excellent and erudite Quicherat, who all unconsciously introduces into the piety of the Maid a great deal of eclectic philosophy. This point was not without its drawbacks. It led free-thinking historians to a ridiculous exaggeration of Jeanne's intellectual faculties, to the absurdity of attributing military talent to her and to the substitution of a kind of polytechnic phenomenon for the fifteenth century's artless marvel. The Catholic ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... the dangers attendant on association with the class to which we refer lies in the fact that they draw around them certain free-thinking, sensual personages, of no very stable morality, who are ready for anything that gives excitement to their morbid conditions of mind. Social disasters, of the saddest kind, are constantly occurring ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur
... honest zeal to her indignation. "For a long time," she continued, "my belle-soeur has been taking the attitude of an injured woman, affecting a disgust with the world and shutting herself up to read free-thinking books. I've never permitted myself, you may believe, the least observation on her conduct, but I can't accept it as the last word either of taste or of tact. When a woman with her prettiness lets her husband stray away she deserves no small part of her fate. I don't wish you to agree with me—on ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... socialistic principles into the army will not accomplish anything," Tolstoi continues. "The hypnotism of the army is so artfully applied that the most free-thinking and rational person will, so long as he is in the army, always do what is demanded of him. Thus there is no way out by means of revolution or ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... called the palladium a fetish. I don't exactly know what the palladium (called a fetish by somebody) was. The hasta fetialis has been styled a fetish—an apparent abuse of language. As to the Holy Cross qua fetish, why discuss such free-thinking credulities? ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... which an individual and his ancestors have always lived, and which they have never doubted the validity of. That this is so we may have occasion to observe among ourselves. Christian teachers question the wisdom of bringing young people under free-thinking influence, because, although they do not deny the morals of free-thinkers, they believe that to unsettle the young may have a disastrous effect, not only on belief, but also on conduct. Yet this dangerously unsettling process has been applied by missionaries on a wholesale scale to races ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... sentiment, too delicate to be felt by the latter practical mind of Dutch-bred England, that Goldsmith makes the admiration of him the test of absurd connoisseurship. But yet, with under-current of intellect, which gets him accused of free-thinking, and therefore with ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... way! And do you feel that it is quite right to criticise the clergy? I always fancy that it is the first step toward free-thinking. And you couldn't see much of them, you know, only the legs. Besides, consider what a wedding with cards and cake would have meant in Bainbridge at this time. No second maid, no proper cook! We should have appeared at a disadvantage in the ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... difficulties, which unavoidably embarrass every attempt to bring these two genealogies into harmony with one another, will lead us to despair of reconciling them, and will incline us to acknowledge, with the more free-thinking class of critics, that they are mutually contradictory. Consequently, they cannot both be true.... In fact, then, neither table has any advantage over the other. If the one is unhistorical, so also ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... life from whose sources and powers the child can take the elements he needs for his own individual growth. Parents should never expect their own highest ideals to become the ideals of their child. The free-thinking sons of pious parents and the Christian children of ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... is my turn,' said the representative of Levi—'I speak in the name of the tribe of Aaron. The natural enemy of the Jews is the Christian church. Therefore we must try to humiliate it, we must instill into it free-thinking, scepticism, and conflicts. Therefore we will, first of all, start a war on the clergy, we will try to arouse suspicion against it and ridicule it. The main pillar of the church is the school. Therefore ...
— The History of a Lie - 'The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion' • Herman Bernstein
... them that was not thoroughly second-rate. Algarotti was an elegant dabbler in scientific matters—he had written a book to explain Newton to the ladies; d'Argens was an amiable and erudite writer of a dull free-thinking turn; Chasot was a retired military man with too many debts, and Darget was a good-natured secretary with too many love affairs; La Mettrie was a doctor who had been exiled from France for atheism and bad manners; and Poellnitz was a decaying baron who, under stress of circumstances, ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... exercise of a boundless arbitrary power, in the Church dark intolerance." It must have been an easy matter to bring charges of revolutionary doctrines against the man who said so innocently, "But I,—I only wanted to train up free-thinking, ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... Ten years had passed since a group of ardent young men, infected with the principles and enthusiasm of 1848, of which Papineau returning from exile in Paris was the apostle, had stormed the constituencies of Lower Canada and had appeared in the parliament of Canada as a radical, free-thinking, ultra-Democratic party, bearing proudly the badge of "Rouge"; and the passage of time was beginning to temper their views with a tinge of sobriety. The church, however, had them all in her black books and Bishop Bourget, that incomparable zealot and bigot, was determined to destroy ...
— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe
... Locke. Rousseau a Free-thinking Christian, but deeply Imbued with Religious Sentiments. Diderot a Capricious Materialist. D'Holbach and Helvetius Avowed Materialists. Condillac a ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... had given birth to them; but this is England, and we Frenchmen respect the thinking of the English mind. I will not translate much, but I will go to work with hearty earnestness, and reproduce in French literature what I find worthy of it in these free-thinking masters. May be, after all, I shall become a great man." The plan succeeded. Voltaire, on his return, became more outspoken in his infidelity. His star ascended; and he ruled, not by original but ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... Review and looked across it at his brother. It was evident to him that 'old Felix' was in one of his free-thinking moods. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... views and her husband's on the functions of Universities. She and the Archdeacon conceived that the Oxford authorities were mainly occupied in ruining the young men's health by over-examination, and poisoning their minds by free-thinking opinions. In her belief, if it went on, the mothers of England would refuse to send their sons to these ancient but deadly resorts. She looked at him sternly as she spoke, as though defying him to be flippant in return. And he, indeed, did his ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the most impressible period of her life by this group of intellectual, free-thinking people, who seem to have fully indoctrinated her with their own opinions. None of them had rejected Christianity or theism, but they were rationalists in spirit, and eager students of philosophy and science. Here were laid the foundations of the doctrines she afterwards held so ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... p. 302, you say you neither have, nor ever have had, the means of going into the question of the miraculousness of the oil of St. Walburga. By good chance, there has arisen a contest not long ago between two papers, a catholic and a free-thinking one, about this very question, from which I collected materials. Afterwards I asked Professor Suttner, of Eichstaedt, if the defender of the miraculousness might be fully and in every point trusted, and I was answered he might, since ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... either. He then proceeds to hew the right reverend lord in pieces. "This bishop," says he, "who had been bred a Presbyterian and man-midwife, which sect and profession he had dropt for a season, while he was President of a Free-thinking Club, had been converted by Bishop Talbot, whose relation he married, and his faith settled in a prebend of Durham, whence he was transplanted by the queen, and advanced by her (who had no aversion to a medley of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... left? Of course! Philosophy! After the world of action, the world of thought. Having set right the health of the British Army, she would now do the same good service for the religious convictions of mankind. She had long noticed—with regret—the growing tendency towards free-thinking among artisans. With regret, but not altogether with surprise, the current teaching of Christianity was sadly to seek; nay, Christianity itself was not without its defects. She would rectify these errors. She would correct the mistakes of the Churches; she would point out just where ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... Lieutenant Pirogov, appealing to the police. They did not fight duels and would have thought a duel with a civilian like me an utterly unseemly procedure in any case—and they looked upon the duel altogether as something impossible, something free-thinking and French. But they were quite ready to bully, especially when ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... themselves to the creed of their Semitic conquerors; they show profound respect for the externals of Mohammedanism, and are sincere in their practice of piety and the obligations of religion and charity; but they have always indulged in the fancies and ideas of the great school of free-thinking philosopher Sofis, whose observance of the ordinances of severe and ...
— Persia Revisited • Thomas Edward Gordon
... strongest nourishment from him." (Hettner, Literaturgeschichte des 18ten Jahrhunderts: ler Theil. 188.) See also Lange's Gesch. des Materialismus, i. 306, etc. An excellent account of Shaftesbury is given by Mr. Leslie Stephen, in his Essays on Free-thinking and Plain-speaking.] ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... folk allow it? Do you want your children stuffed full of American ideas? What is in those books they are studying? You don't know? Neither do I. I would not look into one of them. But you ought to know that to learn English is to learn free-thinking. Do you know who print those books that your children are rubbing their noses in? Yankees! Oh, I doubt not they have been sharp enough to sprinkle a little of the stuff they call religion here and there in them; 'tis but the bait on the hook! But you silly 'Cadians think your children are ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... been much noise made about free-thinking; and men have been animated in the contest by a spirit that becomes neither the character of divines nor that of good citizens, by an arbitrary tyrannical spirit under the mask of religious zeal, and by a presumptuous factious spirit ...
— Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope • Lord Bolingbroke
... ibn Maymun, the son of a learned and free-thinking doctor in Southern Persia, brought up in the doctrines of Gnostic Dualism and profoundly versed in all religions, was in reality, like his father, a pure materialist. By professing adherence to the creed of orthodox Shi-ism, and proclaiming a knowledge of the mystic doctrines ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... years of service gone for nothing! All his industry and diligence thrown away! As a young man he had sown his wild oats, of course; he had boasted of his free-thinking and denied the existence of God to his companions in public-houses. But that was all passed and done with... nearly. He still bought a copy of Reynolds's Newspaper every week but he attended to his religious duties and for nine-tenths ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... might well regret that his hero had not been more mixed up with the reforming and free-thinking class, so that he might find a pretext for writing a chapter upon the state of Boston society forty years ago. A needful warrant for such regret should be, properly, that the biographer's own personal reminiscences should stretch back to that period ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... crew. And what will be now? The stupid boy will go home to breakfast in a bazaar of costly presents, and he will make the stupid speech written by the fool of an Englishman, and the ladies will weep. But where will be the Judaism in all this? Who will vaccinate him against free-thinking as I would have done? Who will infuse into him the true patriotic fervor, the love of his race, the love of Zion, the land ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... ban, which shows itself in all sorts of little ways—in business, in society, everywhere. My mother, poor thing, hears it in her shop from her customers, and it always takes the same annoying form: regret about modern disbelief, and free-thinking, and so on; and I am certain that most people regard it as a stroke of wonderful good luck, that I was prevented in good time from corrupting—yes, no less than corrupting—our noble workpeople. So I said to myself, 'Since there is such a wide difference ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... reported, but their purport is always the same. Stebbing, in his monograph Sir Walter Raleigh, says that Harriot was accused by zealots of atheism, because his cosmogony was not orthodox, and that his ill-repute for free-thinking was reflected on Raleigh, who hired him to teach mathematics (probably in what Father Parsons termed his school of atheism) and engaged him in his colonising projects. Harriot was the friend whose society he chiefly craved when ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... out after five years (why, Heaven or the other place knows!) and he became a reformed character—the Solomon-Socrates-Senancour above mentioned plus a sort of lay "director" to Lelia, with a carbonaro attitude of political revolutionary and free-thinking illumine. Now ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... he found the city in a state of turmoil. The occasion was the march of the Catholic gymnastic associations from the church where they had heard the Mass to St. Peter's, where they were to be received by the Holy Father. Cries of "Long live free-thinking!" were issuing from the rabble which followed hooting in the wake of the procession. To these were retorted, "Viva il Papa Re!" Jose had been caught in the melee, and, but for the interference of the civil authorities, might have suffered bodily injury. With his corporeal ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking |
