"Free thought" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... like, not to mention the small nondescript rabble which everywhere does its best to bring discredit upon socialistic principles—a mere handful, perhaps, but largely composed of fanatics and madmen, people half hysterical from failure, poverty, vice and an indigestion of so-called 'free thought.' There have not been many sovereigns nowadays whose lives have not been attempted by such men at one time or another. Within our own memory an Emperor of Russia, a President of the French Republic and two Presidents of the United States have been actually murdered ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... the throes of her birth. She had not yet reached the vigour of her youth, though she was full of life and energy. She was about to become the England of free thought, commerce, and manufactures; to plough the ocean with her navies, and to plant her colonies over the earth. Up to the accession of Elizabeth, she had done little, but now she ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... the least astonishing in his having been this—if he was. The tendency of the Renaissance towards what is called "free thought" is quite well known; and the existence, in the seventeenth century, of a sort of school of boisterous and rather vulgar infidelity is familiar—with the names of Bardouville, and Saint-Ibal or Saint-Ibar, as members of it—to ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... grounds are, as I have said, divine; but, alack-a-day! there is such a thing as seeing all beautiful around you—pleasant woods, white paths, green lawns, and blue sunshiny sky—and not having a free moment or a free thought left to enjoy them. The children are constantly with me. As for correcting them, I quickly found that was out of the question; they are to do as they like. A complaint to the mother only brings black ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Mahometanism, and if they had occasion to blame French ministers of state, would seem to be satirizing the viziers of Turkey. Politics and theology are subjects of unceasing and vivid interest, and their discussion cannot be suppressed, unless minds are to be smothered altogether. If any measure of free thought and speech is to be admitted, the engrossing topics will find expression. If people are not allowed pamphlets and editorials, they will bring out their ideas in poems and fables. Under Louis XV and Louis XVI, politics ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... the morning he was resolved to deny himself Bessie. Peace would be his instead. If it did not come immediately he knew it was on the way. For once before he had struggled and been so rewarded. That was in his eighteenth year when he awoke to the glories of free thought, and knew himself a victim to the Moloch of the Sabbath, to which fathers sacrifice their children. The proprietor of the fancy goods was a Jew, and moreover closed on Saturdays. But for this anachronism of keeping Saturday holy when you had Sunday also to laze on, Daniel ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... which logically results in the destruction of the entire human race. Or, if he be an accomplished statesman and theologian like Pobedonostzeff, he may reason himself back into mediaeval methods, and endeavor to fetter all free thought and to crush out all forms of Christianity except the Russo-Greek creed and ritual. Or, if he be a man of the highest genius in literature, like Tolstoi, whose native kindliness holds him back from the ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... early novels all reflect in measure the personal sorrows of the author, although George Sand never ceased to protest against too strict a biographical interpretation of their incidents. "Spiridion" (1839), composed under the influence of Lamennais, deals with questions of free thought in religion. But the novels of the first period of her literary activity, which came to a close in 1840, are mainly occupied with a lyrical individualism, and are inspired by the wrongs and disillusions of the ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... of fictitious early history might be considered unimportant, like the fact that, with us, parsons have to pretend to believe the Bible, which some people think innocuous. But it is part of the whole system, which has a political object, to which free thought and free speech are ruthlessly sacrificed. As ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... Personally he had weaknesses. He was afraid of apparitions, he dreaded assassination, and had a fear that Burnet and the bishops would burn him as a heretic. His philosophy, though useful, as Mr. Mill says, in expanding free thought and exciting inquiry, was based on selfishness. Nothing can be falser and more detestable than the maxims of this sage of the Restoration and of reaction. He holds the natural condition of man to be a state of war—a war of all men against all men; might making right, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... fly the boundary of the senses—live The ideal life free thought can give; And, lo, the gulf shall vanish, and the chill Of the soul's impotent despair be gone! And with divinity thou sharest the throne, Let but divinity become thy will! Scorn not the law—permit its iron band The sense (it ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... college, as you will probably admit, will approach both Rome on the one hand, and science on the other—Rome, as giving the priesthood more skill, and therefore as paving the way for their obtaining greater power, and science, by recognising that even free thought has a certain kind of value in spiritual enquiries. To this purpose Pryer and I have resolved to devote ourselves henceforth heart ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... to the readers of the New Dawn, however, a faintly ominous note was sounded. It appeared that the interests had heinously conspired to suppress the magazine because of its loyalty to the ideals of free thought and free speech. In short, its life was menaced. Support was withdrawn by those who had suddenly perceived that the New Dawn meant the death of privilege; that "this flowering of mature and seasoned personalities" threatened the supremacy of the old order of industrial slavery. ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... ecclesiastical shape, and recall to him the days when his mother's great-grandmother was strangled on Witch Hill, with a text from the Old Testament for her halter. With all this, he has a boundless belief in the future of this experimental hemisphere, and especially in the destiny of the free thought of its ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... his Discourse of Free-thinking, shows the right of free thought (i. e., of judgment on rational grounds) in general, from the principle that no truth is forbidden to us, and that there is no other way by which we can attain truth and free ourselves from superstition, and the right to apply it to God and the Bible in particular, from the fact that ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... see it in no other way but this: the President suppressed free thought and free speech when he insisted upon personal neutrality. He held back the deliberate and spontaneous thought and speech of the people except the pro-Germans, who saw their chance and improved it! The mass of the American people found themselves forbidden to think ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... the wise and intelligent. Among the timid and ignorant he may rule in undisputed power; but to men of reason and thought he is repulsive. He is kept at arm's length as a piece of humanity whose "room is better than his person." In these days of free thought and free speech, who will submit to be hectored out of his right to think, and to speak as he thinks, by one who has nothing but his own dictatorial self-conceit to show as his authority, perhaps backed with a pretentious influence coming from a subordinate ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... the nation begins to enjoy the inestimable right of free thought and free speech, factional tyrants lose no time in depriving citizens of these, proclaiming to all that would maintain the integrity of their consciences: Tremble, die, or believe ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... but I tell you Boston has opened, and kept open, more turnpikes that lead straight to free thought and free speech and free deeds than any other city of live men or dead men,—I don't care how broad their streets are, nor how high ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... history of philosophy, during the last two or three centuries, cannot but admit that there appears to have existed a sort of secret and tacit compact among the learned, not to pass beyond a certain limit in speculative science. The privilege of free thought, so highly extolled, has at no time been held valid in actual practice, except within this limit; and not a single stride beyond it has ever been ventured without bringing obloquy on the transgressor. The few men of genius among the learned class, who actually ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... commencing his remarks a Latin quotation,) "tranquilitati probrosoe anteponenda est, and in the lively observations we have heard, I mark not the signs of dissension, but of free thought, having in view the honor of God and the welfare of his little flock scattered abroad in a strange land. But the good shepherd will yet gather the dispersed into his arms, and gently lead them through green pastures and by still ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... it, he would speak with glowing enthusiasm on art; then his eyes seemed to become bright, and his bent figure more erect, and his whole bearing proud and dignified. There were times, too, when he would speak on other subjects: on the morality of free thought—on Bruno, of blessed memory, on him, and scores of others too. He would speak of the different schools of philosophy; he would laugh at himself, and at all who, having given time and thought to the study of life's complicated problems, had not reached one step further than ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... and the gift of a millon dollars for building a vast Temple of Humanity, that would be a forum of free thought in the heart of the metropolis, were the subject of ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... Helvidius, which were burnt, and their authors put to death, under the tyranny of Domitian (Tacitus, Agricola 2). Let these cases suffice to connect the custom with Pagan Rome, and to prove that this particular mode of warring with the expression of free thought boasts its precedents in ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer |
