Free Inquiry Quotes

#1. Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience.

Christopher Hitchens

#2. If the student truly absorbs the concept of free inquiry in the field of music, unimpeded by blind adherence to doctrine and tradition, he will bring something of this approach not only to other fields of knowledge but to the conduct of his daily life,

William Howard Schuman

#3. We think ourselves possessed, or, at least, we boast that we are so, of liberty of conscience on all subjects, and of the right of free inquiry and private judgment in all cases, and yet how far are we from these exalted privileges in fact!

John Adams

#4. Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error.

Thomas Jefferson

#5. The faithful believe that certain truths have been 'revealed.' The skeptics and secularists believe that truth is only to be sought by free inquiry and trial and error. Only one of those positions is dogmatic.

Christopher Hitchens

#6. Whenever philosophy has taken into its plan religion, it has ended in skepticism; and whenever religion excludes philosophy, or the spirit of free inquiry, it leads to willful blindness and superstition.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#7. A university's essential character is that of being a center of free inquiry and criticism - a thing not to be sacrificed for anything else.

Richard Hofstadter

#8. As unbalanced parties of every description can never tolerate a free inquiry of any kind, when employed against themselves, the license, and even the most temperate freedom of the press, soon excite resentment and revenge.

John Adams

#9. Every politician, every member of the clerical profession, ought to incur the reasonable suspicion of being an interested supporter of false doctrines, who becomes angry at opposition, and endeavors to cast an odium on free inquiry. Fraud and falsehood only dread examination. Truth invites it.

Thomas Cooper

#10. It is a tragic and potentially lethal irony that those who most despise science and the method of free inquiry should have been able to pilfer from it and annex its sophisticated products to their sick dreams.

Christopher Hitchens

#11. Just fear me and love me ... and do as I say ... and I will be your slave.

A.C.H. Smith

#12. Love is free; to promise for ever to love the same woman is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed; such a vow in both cases excludes us from all inquiry.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

#13. Oh, I have just had an idea - after tea I shall attack myself with sandpaper.

Dodie Smith

#14. The most all penetrating spirit before which will open the possibility of tilting not tables, but planets, is the spirit of free human inquiry. Believe only in that.

Dmitri Mendeleev

#15. I always assumed scientists were free to ask any question, pursue any line of inquiry without fear or reprisal.

Ben Stein

#16. A fundamental element of human nature is the need for creative work, for creative inquiry, for free creation without the arbitrary limiting effects of coercive institutions. A decent society should maximize the possibilities for this fundamental human characteristic to be realized.

Noam Chomsky

#17. I am a ball player in the summer and a farmer in the winter time, and I aim to be a success at both professions.

Zack Wheat

#18. In China, the dead are not forgotten - my relatives cheerfully pointed out all the niches of deceased friends and family, as if gesturing at the homes of the living.

Tess Gerritsen

#19. I do not doubt your intellectual or spiritual equality with me, mate. When I saw you belong to me, it is only because I belong so utterly to you, as well.

Christine Warren

#20. The British Museum was founded with a civic purpose: to allow the citizen, through reasoned inquiry and comparison, to resist the certainties that endanger free society and are still among the greatest threats to our liberty.

Neil MacGregor

#21. God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was quite the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization.

Christopher Hitchens

#22. Any woman I know can smell a boyfriend a mile away. Women are intuitive: they know when a guy is interested but he's not going to be there for her in that boyfriend-y way.

Julie Klausner

#23. Many scientists think that philosophy has no place, so for me it's a sad time because the role of reflection, contemplation, meditation, self inquiry, insight, intuition, imagination, creativity, free will, is in a way not given any importance, which is the domain of philosophers.

Deepak Chopra

#24. There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

#25. As a rule, the extent to which politics can become the object of free scientific inquiry is a most accurate barometer by which to measure the degree of academic freedom in a country.

Masao Maruyama

#26. The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.

Christopher Hitchens

#27. Kaylee and Nash are like those rocks that ancient cave people used to make fire. Bang them together, and you get sparks." Sabine said.
"Let's never again use the phrase 'bang them together' in reference to my brother and my girlfriend," Tod mumbled.

Rachel Vincent

#28. Free scientific inquiry? The first adjective is redundant.

Ayn Rand

#29. I believe in evolution, scientific inquiry, and global warming; I believe in free speech, whether politically correct or politically incorrect, and I am suspicious of using government to impose anybody's religious beliefs -including my own- on nonbelievers.

Barack Obama

#30. Meditation is not a process of learning how to meditate; it is the very inquiry into what is meditation. To inquire into what is meditation, the mind must free itself from what it has learnt about meditation, and the freeing of the mind from what it has learnt is the beginning of meditation.

Jiddu Krishnamurti