"Freedom of thought" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... allies by Zachary Macaulay and by the quaker William Allen. A 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 ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... founded by an 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 cheers ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... 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 an idea of the vast comprehensiveness ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Under its operations, the human mind and human soul seemed to expand and to compass a grasp it had scarcely known before. There were universal content and universal harmony. The laws were everywhere respected, and everywhere enforced. The freedom of thought, and the liberty of action unrestrained, stimulated an ambition in every man to discharge his duties faithfully to the Government, and honestly in all social relations. There was universal security to person and property, because every law-breaker was deemed a public enemy, and ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... 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 ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... only enables him, but forces him, to sympathise with what he sees in the opposite camp. If he is what is called a Liberal, his whole heart is yet pouring itself forth towards the great truths of Christianity. If he is what is called orthodox, his whole intellect is alive to the right and duty of freedom of thought. He will therefore attract and repel on both sides. And he appears to feel that the position of double sympathy gives him a special advantage, to attract to each side what is true in its opposite, and to correct in each what ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... sketched the plan of all their future work. They had regained their episcopal orders. They had defined their mission in the world. They had chosen their Gospel message. They had asserted their freedom of thought. They had won the goodwill of the State. They had adopted the "settlement system." They had begun their Diaspora work for the scattered, and their mission work for the heathen; and thus they had revived ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... 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 with that of the poet in associations the most engaging, ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... would be like exchanging the dusty midsummer road for the shade of the woods where the brook calms the day with its pellucid note of effortless flow, and the hours hide themselves from the glances of the sun. In the forest of Arden I felt sure I should find the repose, the quietude, the freedom of thought, which would permit me to know myself. There, too, I suspected Nature had certain surprises for me; certain secrets which she has been holding back for the fortunate hour when her spell would be supreme and unbroken. I even hoped that I might come unaware ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... October 8, of that year: "Mr. Brattle 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 such real distress to the community. They, who ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... 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 in the heart of man, and wakes ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... 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 ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... of these Northmen formed a very large proportion of the population of the East Anglian counties, and consequently of the men who founded New England. The East Anglian counties have been conspicuous for resistance to tyranny and for freedom of thought. See my Beginnings of New ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... 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 vindication of his Majesty from the calumnies and scandal ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... 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 Dean Swift, ...
— The Eighteenth Century in English Caricature • Selwyn Brinton
... "the land is the 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 ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... she gained from this constant intercourse with her father were incalculable. Without the least loss to her freedom of thought, nay, on the contrary, to the far more rapid development of her truest liberty, the soutar seemed to avoid no subject as unsuitable for the girl's consideration, but to insist only on its being regarded from the highest attainable point of view. Matters of indifferent import ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... method of shutting the mouths of those who disagreed with him was particularly obnoxious to her. It was also most ineffectual with her. From childhood she had always spoken as she felt. No discipline checked her. Freedom of speech as well as freedom of thought were as natural and essential to her ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... the economic processes that underlie these intellectual activities at the present time. Except for the universities and much of the public educational organization, except for a few pulpits endowed for good under conditions that limit freedom of thought and expression, except for certain needy and impecunious propagandas, the whole of this apparatus of public thought and discussion to-day has been created and is sustained by ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... an inquirer's intelligence, no consideration except the logic of apprehended facts should determine his conclusion. An argument was to be followed wherever it might lead, and its consequences must be faced in full without withdrawal behind any non-intellectual screen. Perfect freedom of thought and perfect freedom of discussion over the whole range of human matters; perfect freedom of consequent action, so the community remained uninjured—this was the typical Hellene's ideal. An instinctive effort to realize it was his habitual attitude towards life. His motto anticipated the Roman poet's ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth
... author of the Declaration of Independence, urged that, if men were left free to declare the truth the effect of its great positive forces would overcome the negative forces of error, he seems to have hit the central fact of civilization. Without freedom of thought and absolute freedom to speak out the truth as one sees it, there can be no advancement, no high civilization. To the orator who has heard the call of humanity, what nobler aspiration than to enlarge and extend the freedom we have inherited from our Anglo-Saxon ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... blessed Saviour was accepted as the Master and the ruler of his life. Men say to themselves and to one another, "Yes, I shall be freer to act, I shall be nobler in my action, but I shall certainly enchain mind and spirit, I shall certainty bind myself to think, away from the rich freedom of thought in which I have been inclined to live." We make very much of free thought in these days. Let us always remember that free thought means the opportunity to think, and not the opportunity not to think. We rejoice in the way in which our fathers came to this country and in their children perpetuated ...
— Addresses • Phillips Brooks
... religious legislation in contradistinction to canonical 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
... objected to the 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
... is a science? To many people the word denotes something cold and unfeeling and rigid, or something that is somehow apart from daily life and antagonistic to freedom of thought. But this is far from being true. Karl Pearson defines science as organized knowledge, and Huxley calls it organized common sense. These definitions mean the same thing. They mean that in order to know anything that deserves confidence, in order to obtain a real ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... Old World are to the last degree unfavorable to the progress of such a nationality as ours. Their tendency being toward the aggrandizement of the few and the centralization of power, renders them wholly incompatible with that freedom of thought and action, that opening up of large fields of exertion as well as of the road to distinction and eminence, with all their incentives to effort, which are the very life of a majestic republic stretching over a large portion of the earth's surface, embracing such mixed nationalities, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... and young men is, meantime, sacrificed. Puritanism was perhaps necessary to develop the moral fibre of the English race, Nonconformity to break the yoke of ecclesiastical domination over men's minds and to prepare the way for freedom of thought in the distant future; still, culture points out that the harmonious perfection of generations of Puritans and Nonconformists has been, in consequence, sacrificed. Freedom of speech may be necessary for the society of ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... might suppose that the sufferings he had to bear from placing himself in opposition to the custom of the school, by refusing to fag, had made him morbidly sensitive on the point of liberty. At a time, however, when freedom of speech, as indicating freedom of thought, was especially obnoxious to established authorities; when no allowance could be made on the score of youth, still less on that of individual peculiarity, Shelley became a student at Oxford. He was then eighteen. Devoted to metaphysical speculation, and especially fond of logical discussion, ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... 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 ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... of Franeker University, 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 authority for the determination of all theoretical ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... half-repentant admirer, almost frightened at the extent of his own freedom of thought, "though I cannot say I am satisfied with Mr. Newman's notions on this subject, —and, in fact, cannot make up my mind upon it,—can there be any thing morally more sublime than the view, that the doctrine of immortality, which has been superficially supposed, ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... inscribing in hieroglyphs upon its pages of stone the mysterious tables of the law. If it were thus,—as there comes in all human society a moment when the sacred symbol is worn out and becomes obliterated under freedom of thought, when man escapes from the priest, when the excrescence of philosophies and systems devour the face of religion,—architecture could not reproduce this new state of human thought; its leaves, so crowded on the face, would ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... but wary eye upon those who profess to believe in Bolshevism. We say candidly that we think Bolshevism is a failure. But we do not condemn everyone else who differs with us. Let there be fair play and justice to all, freedom of thought and speech, with decent respect for the rights ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... through him and through his 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. Luther's great influence on the literature ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... catastrophe. The piece ends with the general joy at the birth of that princess, and with prophecies of the happiness which she was afterwards to enjoy or to diffuse. It was only by such a turn that the hazardous freedom of thought in the rest of the composition could have passed with impunity: Shakspeare was not certainly himself deceived respecting this theatrical delusion. The true conclusion is the death of Catharine, which under a feeling of this kind, he has placed earlier than was conformable to history. ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... 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 ...
— A True Hero - A Story of the Days of William Penn • W.H.G. Kingston
... on the "moderate" side. He remained for some time—perhaps two years—in Nikolsburg and faced the persecution which prevailed in that city during the winter of 1527-1528. The next year he comes to notice in Strasbourg where, for a long time, a much larger freedom of thought was allowed than in any other German city of the period. The great tragedy which he had to experience was the frustration of the work of his life by the growth and spread of the Ranter influence in the Anabaptist circles, through the leadership of Melchior Hoffman and others of a similar spirit. ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... suppressing the unwillingness of the clergy to accept the arbitrary decree which he issued in proclaiming his mandate. His attempt to bridge the great gulf between the hostile creeds entirely failed, and the Persians remained Shiahs. Freedom of thought and liberty of speech are national characteristics and privileges, and with minds never thoroughly subjected to severe Church discipline, the people have been ever ready to indulge in free criticisms on religious and other matters. They had no desire to study a ...
— Persia Revisited • Thomas Edward Gordon
... had transformed thought and prepared the way for a regime of enlightenment and humanity. Rousseau, on the contrary, directed all the engines of passion against the whole temporal fabric, and was so little careful of freedom of thought, so little confident in the plenary efficacy of rational persuasion, as to insist upon the extermination of atheists by law. The position of each was at once irrefragable and impossible. It was impossible to effect ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... itself kings and tyrants: every man's hand and soul it used, the lowest as the highest, and in its bosom at least were all men free: it did its work, not creating an art more perfect than itself, but rather other things than art, freedom of thought and speech, and the longing for light and knowledge and the coming days that should slay it: and so at last it died in the hour of its highest hope, almost before the greatest men that came of it had ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... 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
... its doctrine. This change was to me, who am tired of the war of words on these subjects, and believe it only sows the wind to reap the whirlwind, refreshing, but I argue nothing from it; there is nothing real in the freedom of thought at the West,—it is from the position of men's lives, not the state of their minds. So soon as they have time, unless they grow better meanwhile, they will cavil and criticise, and judge other men by their own ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... necessity of maintaining the Catholic religion in all its purity. It meant burn, slay, destroy, or drive out of the realm, all who oppose the religion of the priests of Rome—crush out with an iron heel every spark of liberty of conscience, of freedom of thought, of Protestant principles. Ernst found afterwards that Master Gresham's thoughts had agreed with his, and that he anticipated fearful evils for the ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... an officer in his tyranny from trial for murder in the place where they should commit their crime. Mr. Toucey has humbly copied that precedent of despotism. It was very proper that the new tyranny growing up here, should select that anniversary to shoot down freedom of thought and speech among the subjects of the slave-power. I welcomed the omen. The Fifth of March is a red-letter day in the calendar of Boston. The Court could hardly have chosen a better to punish a man for a thought and a word, ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... servility, testified the greatest zeal on every occasion for the emperor Napoleon, celebrated his fete-day, and boasted of his protection,[5] and of the freedom they were still permitted to enjoy. Freedom of thought was expressly prohibited. Sycophants, in the pay of the foreign ruler, as, for instance, Zschokke, alone guided public opinion. In Zug, any person who ventured to speak disparagingly of the Swiss in the service of France was declared an enemy to his country and exposed to severe punishment.[6] ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... Third, or to believe in France! Is it so poor a thing to become a leader of a party that has gained an empire, that has put an end to the Algerine piracy, that has reduced the debt, that has made easier every man's condition, and that stands for freedom of thought and deed and advance of all knowledge? Party! Now and then, even in Virginia, there is a marriage between the parties! My family—or my lack of family? The fact that my father rolled tobacco, and that now and then I broke a colt for you?" He smiled. "Well, you must allow that I broke them ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... by Mr. 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 yielding a large meed of admiration to the fervent humanity ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... 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
... rather been shaken off by it, he had scandalized no less 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 to the State ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... 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. Virginia was not founded upon any theocratic concept ...
— Religious Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century - The Faith of Our Fathers • George MacLaren Brydon
... creatures as for the other, though they have not the same weight in the world; and consequently the faith of the women must hold the balance straight, especially if, as is said, they exceed us in point of numbers. This leaves a little margin for those of them who profess the same freedom of thought as is generally accorded to men—a class, I must add, which I abominate from the bottom of ...
— A Beleaguered City • Mrs. Oliphant
... inevitable esoterism that must persist at the kernel of all democracies, unless these degenerate into mere rabble and intellectual mob: they are the last, therefore, to maintain that one person's word is as good as another's; that common sense is competent to solve all questions; that freedom of thought means the right of all to think as they please. Knowing, on the contrary, the extreme complexity of all problems, and the facility with which the most upright judgment may become warped in meditating upon them, they are prepared to exact a long apprenticeship in thinking from ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... are the most complex of all the human kind. The effort toward simplicity is not a movement back to nature, for there savage and lower animal are completely enslaved by custom and instinct; it is a movement upward toward the freedom of thought and action of which our best intelligence has given us a conception and for which it has given us a longing. Never had Susan met so simple a man; and never had she seen one so far from all the silly ostentations of rudeness, of unattractive dress, of eccentric or ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... heart of hearts the social scientist shares this estimate of himself. He has little inner certainty about his own work. He only half believes in it, and being sure of nothing, he can find no compelling reason for insisting on his own freedom of thought. What can he actually claim for it, in the light of his own conscience? [Footnote: Cf. Charles E. Merriam, The Present State of the Study of Politics, American Political Science Review, Vol. XV. No. 2, May, 1921.] His ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... different grounds, and attempting to correct the representations of sense by the notions of reason. But both schools, although they did not establish many truths, raised an inquisitive spirit, and awakened freedom of thought and inquiry. They raised up workmen for more enlightened times, even as scholastic inquirers in the Middle Ages prepared the way for the revival of philosophy on sounder principles. They were all men of remarkable elevation of character as well as genius. They hated superstitions, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... in human lives. The unanimous refusal of the framers 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
... tyranous Act, 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 the ...
— Thankful Blossom • Bret Harte
... 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
... forehead, and the straight, finely-pointed nose, formed a profile indicating commanding elevation of character. And the soul imprisoned behind these temples was powerfully agitated, seeking ever for freedom of thought and expression. It was the eye, the head of a hero; and, had his form corresponded with the giant strength of his glance, he would have been a Titan, and might have crushed the world like a toy in his hand. But his slender, symmetrical, and graceful ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... active generation to renounce their convictions or desires; they remained sincerely liberal, but without practical or urgent pretension, and with the reserve of men who had suffered much and succeeded little in their attempts at legislative reform. They still held to freedom of thought and speech, but had no aspirations after power. They detested and warmly criticized despotism, but without any open attempt to repress or overthrow existing authority. It was the opposition of enlightened and independent lookers-on, who had neither the opportunity ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... the most 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
... men as these will give a 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 the key of knowledge. ...
— Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope • Lord Bolingbroke
... 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
... expend years of toil and research on such an undertaking, while it was possible that, at the last moment, the caprice, the malice, the folly of one man might frustrate the whole design? And was it certain that the law which so grievously restricted both the freedom of trade and the freedom of thought had really added to the security of the State? Had not recent experience proved that the licenser might himself be an enemy of their Majesties, or, worse still, an absurd and perverse friend; that he might suppress a book of which it would be for their interest that every house ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... especially at the hand of the elegant Grinevitch, which had such long white fingers, such long yellow filbert-shaped nails, and such huge shining studs on the shirt-cuff, that apparently they absorbed all his attention, and allowed him no freedom of thought. Oblonsky noticed this ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... compressed the energies and desires of a people, the more danger of their bursting into revolution. There is no safety-valve to passions and desires like the utterance of them,—no better corrective to false ideas than the free expression of them. Freedom of thought can never be suppressed, and ideas kept too long pent up in the bosom, when heated by some sudden crisis of passion, will explode into license and fury. Let me put a column from Milton here into my own weak plaster; the words are well known, but cannot be too well known. "Though ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... conflict between beliefs is rather the result of feeling or passion than of judgment. Because men who differ in opinion hate each other, it does not follow that they must therefore deny the right to freedom of thought, or maintain that belief may be changed at will. The red man and the white man may cordially hate each other; but it would hardly be accurate to say that the former denies the right of the latter to his color, or thinks him morally responsible for it. Yet men are quite ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... acknowledge, to my shame, that I did not listen to all he said, but, in a favorite way I have, reserved some of my own freedom of thought, while I gave him complete freedom of speech. And I am bound to say he did not abuse it, but consented to pause at the frontiers of Thessaly. Then followed silence. I gave him room to stretch. Soon, lulled by the motion of the carriage, the stream ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... 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 ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... you that they would as readily follow you as they would a knight of experience. Moreover, good fighters as the English are, they are far more independent and inclined to insubordination than the French, who have never been brought up in the same freedom of thought. Therefore, although I have no doubt that they will respect your authority, I doubt whether, were I to put a Frenchman in command, they would prove so docile, while with the French there will be no difficulty. I might, of course, appoint John Harpen, ...
— At Agincourt • G. A. Henty
... be known. What does this signify? Do we still live on a planet on which we dare not express what we hold to be the truth—planet Terra so huge and yet so contemptibly small? Has mankind still only freedom of thought, but not freedom of utterance? The powers may blockade Greece; can they blockade thoughts on wings of words? It has been attempted, but force is no proof, and when we have visited the prisons in which Galilei or even Giordano Bruno ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... illusions have been dispelled, the illusion of the immobility and eternity of classes still persists. But it is well to remember that in Holland in the sixteenth century, in England in the seventeenth, in Europe since the revolution of 1789, we have seen that freedom of thought in science, literature and art, for which the bourgeoisie fought, triumphed over the tyranny of the mediaeval dogma. And this condition, instead of being a glorious but transitory stage, is supposed to be the end of the development of humanity, which is henceforth condemned ...
— The Positive School of Criminology - Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901 • Enrico Ferri
... occasion when this power has been exerted: we all know how many national movements have been interfered with or thwarted; we know the shameful revelations connected with the elections a few years back; we know how a great leader fell; and those who are idealists, God's warriors battling for freedom of thought, whose hope for the world is that the intuitions of the true and good divinely implanted in each man's breast shall supersede tradition and old authority, cannot but feel that their opinions, so much more dangerous to ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... (without admiration no one ever falls in love). I love her ways and her mind, I love her chilly dampness and her hot, glowing fires (attempts to analyse and classify love are always silly). In her thinkers and workers, in her schemes and efforts for social improvement, in her freedom of thought and speech ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... 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 ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... been 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 spread of ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... be freedom of thought. Women, more than men, are bound by tradition and authority. What the father, the brother, the doctor, and the minister have said has been received undoubtingly. Until women throw off this reverence ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... of Oriental nations was non-progressive in its nature. It had a tendency to repress freedom of thought and freedom of action. Connected as it was with the binding influence of caste, man could not free himself from the dictates of religion. The awful sublimity of nature found its counterpart in the terrors of religion; and that religion attempted to {175} answer all the questions that might ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... clash with this authority, which focussed attention upon the scientific struggle for freedom of thought, was that which followed the publication of the Origin of Species at the end of 1859, and culminated in the debate with the Bishop of Oxford at the Oxford meeting of the British Association in 1860. A fierce but more limited struggle for freedom of criticism within the pale of the Church ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... us, even with pride, that in Germany the supreme conception is the dedication of Man to the State. This was not true of old Germany. Before the formation of the Prussian empire, her spirit was intensely individualistic. She stood preeminently for freedom of thought and action. It was this that gave her noble spiritual heritage. Goethe is the most individualistic of world masters. Froebel developed, in the Kindergarten, one of the purest of democracies. Luther and German protestantism represented the affirmation of individual conscience as against hierarchical ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... the right to choose his own surroundings. The strongest reason for giving woman all the opportunities for higher education, for the full development of her faculties, her forces of mind and body; for giving her the most enlarged freedom of thought and action; a complete emancipation from all forms of bondage, of custom, dependence, superstition; from all the crippling influences of fear—is the solitude and personal responsibility of her own individual ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... 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 it. That ius divinum was a part of the ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... equal. All men are created equal as to the essential rights and privileges of humanity. They have a claim to live; they have an impartial share in the Divine Love; they have a right to liberty, to freedom of thought and of limb, by a constitution older than any historical document, drawn up in the court of God's decrees and authenticated by His handwriting in the soul. Thus far all men are created equal, and, if it turns out otherwise with them, it ensues from what is made by man, ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... Plymouth, graduated at Oxford; was at first an Aristotelian and Puritan in his opinions, but after the Restoration entered the Church, and obtained preferment in various sees; his fame rests upon his eloquent appeal for freedom of thought in "The Vanity of Dogmatising" (1661) and upon his two works in defence of a belief in witches; he was one of the first Fellows of the Royal Society; he seems to have made Sir Thomas Browne his model, though he ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... frequent and rapid communication between different parts of the country, by the encouragement of immigration, which brings with it the varied habits and diverse genius and industry of other lands, by a free press, by freedom of thought and of conscience, and a liberal toleration in ...
— The Constitutional Development of Japan 1863-1881 • Toyokichi Iyenaga
... of 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 individual held in check, ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... an older age, when brute force and the spirit of plunder ruled, we have come after these long thousands of years to experience the agony of ten years of foreign oppression, with every loss to the right to live, every restriction of the freedom of thought, every damage done to the dignity of life, every opportunity lost for a share in the intelligent advance of the age ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie
... till, in our own day the last sounds of the long fight are dying about us, as fading echoes, in the guise of a few puerile attempts to enforce trivial disabilities on the ground of abstract convictions. The vanguard of humanity has won its battle for freedom of thought. ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... on the occasion of my visit to Cross Lanes was only the beginning of the acquaintance on which I based the estimate of them which I have given; but it was a good beginning, for the cordial freedom of thought and speech in the conference was such as to bring out the characteristics of the men. I rode back to my camp in the evening, feeling a sense of relief at the transfer of responsibility to other shoulders. ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... and so of relatively trivial moment, dates and 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 to the story, but as to the ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... chair ride, I walked beside her, holding her hand, through Kensington Park. I hope and almost believe she will go back to America with me. I feel sure that we, who have not forgotten her early and wonderful work for woman and for freedom of thought, will do all in our power to smooth her last days.... That evening Rachel and I went to see Irving and Ellen Terry in Much Ado About Nothing. The painting and the lights and shadows of the scenery were lovely, and I suppose the acting ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... that many who hate the papal 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, ...
— Villegagnon - A Tale of the Huguenot Persecution • W.H.G. Kingston
... Dr. W. B. Carpenter. He expressed the lowest opinion of the Fellows of the Royal Society. To him the professional man of science, with self-conscious knowledge for his ideal and aim, was a medicine-man, priest, augur—useful, perhaps, in his way, but to be carefully watched by all who value freedom of thought and person, lest with opportunity he develop into a persecutor of the worst type. Not content with blackguarding the audience to whom his work should most appeal, he went on to depreciate that work itself and its author in his finest ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... United States, but who admires their unceasing exertions in behalf of their country, who would admire their institutions, based as they are upon those of England, if the grand design of Washington had been carried out, and perfect freedom of thought and of action had been secured to the people, instead of a slavish awe of the mob, an absolute dread of the uneducated masses, a sovereign contempt of the opinion of the world in accomplishing any design ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... fell into a dangerous state of illness by thus delaying the crisis of the malady, and were obliged at last to save themselves from a miserable death by submitting to the unwelcome but sole means of cure. Thus it appears that the age was so little favourable to freedom of thought, that even the most decided sceptics, incapable of guarding themselves against the recollection of what had been presented to the eye, were subdued by a poison, the powers of which they had ridiculed, and which was in itself ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... exhibition of force, would have been lost but for bloodshed. The great American Republic owes its existence and the preservation of its unity to this inevitable means, and neither arbitration, moral persuasion, nor sentimental argument would ever have exchanged Philippine monastic oppression for freedom of thought and ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... power, and to cause his own religious creed to be universally accepted. To promote these objects he had no scruples in regard to means. His own people were tortured and executed by the thousand. By this savage policy he stamped out heresy, placed freedom of thought under a ban, and put an end to the intellectual progress of the country. In his dealings with other nations his diplomacy included all the arts of ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... lack; they call for that which there is the keenest inquiry for. Yet one would be mistaken were he pessimistically to assume that in such a people there is less courage, resolution, enthusiasm, and will than in the average of others. There is quite as much courage and freedom of thought, but still more is needed. For when the reaction in a literature forces the new ideas into the background, and when a community has daily heard itself blamed, derided, and even cursed for its hypocrisy and its conventionality, yet has remained ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... never doubtful; but the triumph of the one would have been dearly bought, and the downfall of the other incomplete. Populations formed in the ideas and habits of a feudal monarchy, and controlled by a hierarchy profoundly hostile to freedom of thought, would have remained a hindrance and a stumbling-block in the way of that majestic experiment of which America is ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... be said that the institution of slavery can not tolerate freedom of thought and speech with safety to the master, then the system is barbarous, and can not exist in a free land. Let it be admitted that there are difficulties connected with the institution; that John Brown raids, and incendiary emissaries, ...
— Thirteen Months in the Rebel Army • William G. Stevenson
... serve as a stimulant to high endeavor. What I would have you guard against is not the memory of slavery, but the constant recollection of it, as the commanding thought of a new people, who should be marching on to the broadest freedom of thought in a new and glorious present, and a still more magnificent future. You will notice here that there is a broad distinction between memory and recollection. Memory is a passive act of the mind, while recollection is the actual seeking of the facts, ...
— Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Reading • Various
... with the ancient writers, that the phenomenon to which we have alluded must be principally accounted for. It was moreover now the epoch, when the genius of Christian Europe made the most decided efforts to shake off the chains which had fettered the freedom of thought. The doctrines of the German Reformers, although the number of their professed disciples was in proportion smaller than in Bohemia, had nevertheless a decided influence upon the general direction of the public ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... far as the great awakening of the thirteenth century—the age 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, in ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... who possess it swarm off as fast as they can to other countries, if there is not a change in the present society, and a return to something like order and rank. Who would remain in a country where there is no freedom of thought or action, and where you cannot even spend your money as you please? Mr Butler the other day built a house at Philadelphia with a porte-cochere, and the consequence was that they called him an aristocrat, and would not vote for him. In short, will enlightened and refined people ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... quite right; I was tempted by a publisher and I fell." "Well," he said, "the book was a good one—and there is something that we lose as we grow older, a sort of youthfulness, a courageous indiscretion, a beautiful freedom of thought; but we can't have everything, and one's books must take their appropriate colours from the mind. May I say that I think your books have grown more and more mature, tolerant, artistic, wise?—and the last was simply admirable. ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... felt a personal interest, a personal pride in the repulse of the Spaniards and the upholding of the Queen. She tyrannized over them as a woman; they defended her as men. But when this foreigner, this Scotch king, came to rule them, they saw no need to yield him such exact obedience. Freedom of thought had brought with it new political ideas, and men talked much of the authority of Parliament and their right to tax themselves. James, on the contrary, had a large conception of the "divine right" of kings, not to be restricted by any law whatever, and a still larger ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... studies, and in the agreeable and improving commerce of 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; whose ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... object to ascertain in what manner and by means of what institutions political and personal freedom may be secured and perpetuated: not license, or the mere right of every man to vote, but entire and absolute freedom of thought and opinion, alike free of the despotism of monarch and mob and prelate; freedom of action within the limits of the general law enacted for all; the Courts of Justice, with impartial Judges and juries, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... menaced by foe In the cruel winters of long ago, They worked and prayed and for freedom wrought, Freedom of speech and freedom of thought. ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... and that made little provision for Negroes, a consecrated deacon invited into his own pew some Negro people, whereupon he lost the right to hold a pew in his church. He decided that there should be some place where there might be more freedom of thought and genuine Christianity, he brought others into the plan, and the effort that he put forth resulted in what has since become the ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... 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
... own. The chief characteristic of this type is to be actuated by an inordinate egotism that is perpetually being inflamed by passion; that makes use of bogeys to frighten people, and does this in such a way that, while it makes all its honest contemporaries afraid of any freedom of thought, it also produces the same result on every single individual by means of reckless persecution. As I wished to portray that type, I naturally took a good deal of the portrait from the representative of the type that I knew best; but, like every artist who ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... throughout—and most clearly at the 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, though he be Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas, not that which flatters the desires of the ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... 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 ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... 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 ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... happiness is attainable only through social evolution, and this comes from greater freedom of thought, from bolder enquiry, from broader experience, and from a scientific study of the laws of causation. What "is" becomes "right" from custom, but with our yearnings for a higher ideal, sentiment slowly yields to the ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... state first lived by the principle which William Penn pronounced: "Any government is free where the people are a party to the laws enacted." So it came about that Independence Hall is on Quaker soil. The Declaration of Independence appeared there, and not on Puritan soil. It may be there was more freedom of thought in Pennsylvania. It may be explained on purely geographical ground, Philadelphia being the most convenient center for the colonies. But it remains significant that not on Cavalier soil in Virginia, not on Dutch soil in New York, not on Puritan soil in Boston, ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... in feature. Says Fenelon: "The right to be wrong in matters of religious belief must be accorded, otherwise we produce hypocrites instead of persons with an enlightened belief that is fully their own. If truth be mighty and God all-powerful, His children need not fear that disaster will follow freedom of thought." ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... home. But all secret, oath-bound 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 ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... seduced into a foolish explanation of the word Parliament by his joke, I hope you will allow me to mention that palam mente, literally translated, means before the mind, and that, if FRANCISCUS or any one else tries to get "freedom of thought or deliberation" out of this, or to get Parliament out of it, or even to get sense out of it, he will only follow the fortune which FRANCISCUS says has befallen all his predecessors, and stumble in limine. The presence of r, and the turning of ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 39. Saturday, July 27, 1850 • Various
... hands as if dealing with a child. "Naturally we have freedom of thought. But you should have the right thoughts, shouldn't you? Wendell, promise me you won't go back ...
— The Junkmakers • Albert R. Teichner
... 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 ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... Trimberg," they call him, and when the pleasure of the feast in the lordly hall of the castle is to be heightened by song and music, he too steps forth, with fearlessness and dignity, to sing of freedom of thought, to the prevalence of which in this company the despised Jew owed his admission to a ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... 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, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... gives a masterly analysis of this time in the opening essay of his "Victorian Poets," showing the shackles all minds wore, and comparing the time when "even nature's laws were compelled to bow to church fanaticism," to the happier day in which "science, freedom of thought, refinement and material progress have ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... is not all theirs, Padre," replied Isagani. "The fault lies partly with those who have taught them to be hypocrites, with those who have tyrannized over freedom of thought and freedom of speech. Here every independent thought, every word that is not an echo of the will of those in power, is characterized as filibusterism, and you know well enough what that means. A fool would he be who to please himself would say aloud what he thinks, who would ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... has been to separate philosophy from theology, and to show the freedom of thought which such separation insures to both. (2) It is now time to determine the limits to which such freedom of thought and discussion may extend itself in the ideal state. (3) For the due consideration of this question we must examine the foundations of a State, first turning our attention to ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part IV] • Benedict de Spinoza
... 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 in ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... represented with eloquence the empty and deplorable banality of the existence forced upon most of them. By expressing in various ways general aspirations towards something better, they let literature continue its teaching, even in times particularly hostile to freedom of thought, like the reign of Nicholas I, the most typical and decided adversary of the freedom of the pen that Europe has ever seen. Literature was, then, considered as an inevitable evil, but one from which the world wanted to free itself; and every man of letters seemed to be under ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... his outlook on life (Weltanschauung), we shall see at least so much, that religious reflection could in no way have influenced him in regard to the writing and publishing of his book on The Descent of Man. Darwin had early won for himself freedom of thought, and to this freedom he remained true to the end of his life, uninfluenced by the customs and opinions of the world ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... ways. It flattered Italian pride and served Italian interests that Rome should be the center of the Christian world. Every person had ties with the church establishment either directly or by relatives. In spite of philosophic freedom of thought or moral contempt for the clergy, "it was a point of good society and refined taste to support the church." "It was easy for Germans and Englishmen to reason calmly about dethroning the papal hierarchy. Italians, however they might loathe the temporal power, could not willingly forego the ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... and so by degrees to the degradation of his country. He reigned for thirty-six years, a time of wealth and luxury, but before he died the nation had begun to suffer from this very luxury; with all freedom of thought forbidden, with the most brave and adventurous of her sons sailing east to the Indies or west to Brazil, most of them never to return, Portugal was ready to fall an easy prey to Philip of Spain when in 1580 there died the old Cardinal King Henry, last surviving ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... positivism, 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 ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... 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
... and powerful, and correspondingly confident, undertake to measure strength with the democratic millions whom they despise. These Northern people, scorned and detested, have ideas—grand and magnificent as well as practical ideas, nurtured by universal education and unlimited freedom of thought and act. The fierce and relentless aristocracy rave in their very madness, and defy the people whom they seek to destroy; but these bear down upon the haughty enemy, slowly and deliberately—awkwardly and blunderingly, it may be, at first, but learning by experience, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... which pertain to the health and life of nations, the sixteenth century was greater than our own. Then began all sorts of inquiries about Nature and about mind, about revelation and Providence, about liberty of worship and freedom of thought; all of which were discussed with an enthusiasm and patience and boldness and originality to which our own times furnish no parallel. And united with this fresh and original agitation of great ideas was a heroism in action which no age of the world ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... own day, has striven in vain to stop the course of fate, and has been hurried onwards at its wheels as its victim or its instrument. And shall Judaea do what profound Egypt and subtle Greece have tried in vain? If even the freedom of thought, the liberal scepticism, nay, the revolutionary theories of Hellas have proved unequal to the task of splitting up the Roman power, if the pomp and luxury of the East have failed, shall the mysticism ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... but even freedom of thought, is a crime in Russia. It is a land of innumerable spies, of secret arrest and rapid condemnation, in which the captive may find himself on the road to Siberia without knowing with what crime he is charged, while his friends, even his ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... pipe with Dr. Parr, that Divine inquired how he came to acquire the love of smoking so much, he replied, "I toiled after it as some people do after virtue."— When Godwin was expatiating on the benefit of unlimited freedom of thought, especially in matters of religion, Lamb, who did not like this, interrupted him by humming the little child's song of "Old Father Longlegs won't say his prayers," adding, violently, "Throw him down stairs!"—He consoles Mr. Crabbe ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... conspicuously the case with regard to the belief in the devils and their works. The more timid of the Reformers clung in a great measure to the Catholic opinions; a small band, under the influence possibly of that knight-errant of freedom of thought, Giordano Bruno, who exercised some considerable influence during his visit to England by means of his Oxford lectures and disputations, entirely denied the existence of evil spirits; but the great majority gave in their ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... strong in his own convictions, holding them keenly, even passionately, while from the structure of his mind, he was somehow deficient in comprehending, much less of sympathizing with the opinions of men who greatly differed from him. This made his homage to entire freedom of thought all the more genuine and rare. In the region of theological thought he was scientific, systematic, and authoritative, rather than philosophical and speculative. He held so strongly that the Christian religion was mainly a religion of facts, that he perhaps allowed too little ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... the Inquisition, and the document concerning this was only discovered a few years ago. The Signoria had never allowed any tribunal to chastise works of literature; on the contrary, Venice, though comparatively poor herself in geniuses of the mind, was the refuge of freedom of thought, and, in fact, had made a sort of compact with Niccolas V., which allowed her to set aside or suspend the decisions of the Holy Office, from which she could not quite emancipate herself. Veronese, however, was denounced by some ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... without, to demand the abolition of the Pope's temporal power in Europe and of the Church's tithing privileges in Canada, and to express heterodox doubts on matters of doctrine. This period soon passed, and the radical leaders confined themselves to demanding freedom of thought and expression and political activity; but the conflict went on. Almost inevitably the conflict was waged in both the political and the religious field. Where the chief question at issue was the relation of church and state, it was difficult to keep politics out of religion or religion ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... remarkable, too, that our Anglo-American has no "poor relations." Not a scurvy nation comes of this stock. They are the Protestant nations, giving religion a moral expression, and reconciling it with freedom of thought. They are the constitutional nations, exacting terms of government that acknowledge private right. Resource may also be emphasized as a characteristic of these nations. Hitherto they have honored every draft that has been ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... truth, 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 ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... lived almost forty years in South Bristol, Ontario County—one of the most secluded spots in Western New York; but from the earliest dawn of reason I pined for that freedom of thought and action that was then denied to all womankind. I revolted in spirit against the customs of society and the laws of the State that crushed my aspirations and debarred me from the pursuit of almost every object worthy of an intelligent, rational mind. But not until that meeting at ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... 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, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... 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 it enable Byron to become a religious force ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... claimed to be the centre of Catholic unity was the grand fomenter of ecclesiastical and political disturbance. The Sovereign Pontiff, and the Catholic princes with whom he was engaged in deadly feuds, were equally faithless, restless, and implacable. Freedom of thought was proscribed, and the human mind was placed under the most exacting and intolerable tyranny by which ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... lays down the principle that the highest end of man is the utmost symmetrical education of his own powers in their individual peculiarities. To accomplish this, he must enjoy the largest freedom of thought and action consistent with the recognition of the same right in others. In regard to religion, the state should have nothing to do with aiding it, but should protect the individual in his opposition to any authoritative form of it. As a wholly personal and subjective matter, social ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... Boston would not sustain it. 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 ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various |
