Quotes About Free Thought

#1. Euripides long ago said, 'who dares not speak his free thought is a slave.' I nominated myself as an 'infidel' as a challenge to thought for those who are asleep.

Luther Burbank

#2. The bourgeoisie, when it was struggling against the nobility sustained by the clergy, hoisted the flag of free thought and atheism; but once triumphant, it changed its tone and manner and today it uses religion to support its economic and political supremacy

Paul Lafargue

#3. If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought, not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

#4. Like George Sand, the feminism of the present day asserts the right of free thought against the creed of authority in every field; the solidarity of mankind and the cause of peace against the patriotism of militarism; social reform against the existing relations of society.

Ellen Key

#5. You behold in me, Stephen said with grim displeasure, a horrible example of free thought.

James Joyce

#6. Many of the Latter-day Saints have surrendered their independence; they have surrendered their free thought, politically, and we have got to get back to where we are not surrendering the right. We must stay with the right and if we do so God will bless us.

Heber J. Grant

#7. Who dares not speak his free thought is a slave.

Euripides

#8. Disease, and most specially opprobrious, suppressed, secret disease, creates a certain critical opposition to the world, to mediocre life, disposes a man to be obstinate and ironical toward civil order, so that he seeks refuge in free thought, in books, in study.

Thomas Mann

#9. Independence and free thought is what makes a person grow. By giving people the freedom and space to figure out who they are and be that, you give them the power to grow.

Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

#10. It is the way, isn't it? With humans and free thought. They only learn through terrible mistakes. Free thought does not make wisdom. Instead it creates enough space for men to commit terrible folly, from which the survivors learn through disaster.

Joel Shepherd

#11. There is no bigotry like that of 'free thought' run to seed.

Horace Greeley

#12. Our social contract is becoming an exchange of free thought for mindless stimuli.

Chris Matakas

#13. In view of the tide of religiosity engulfing a once secular republic it is refreshing to be reminded by Freethinkers that free thought and skepticism are robustly in the American tradition. After all the Founding Fathers began by omitting God from the American Constitution.

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

#14. It is not growing fanaticism, but growing democracy, that causes my troubles. Did you ever read the life of Averroes? He was protected by kings, but hated by the mob, which was fanatical. In the end, the mob won. Free thought has always been a perquisite of aristocracy.

Bertrand Russell

#15. She'd wanted to be free, thought it was the only way to be happy, when happiness was belonging to Jonah.

Tessa Bailey

#16. Pure Christianity and serious godliness fear not the scrutiny of a free thought, but despise the impotent malice of a prejudiced one.

Matthew Henry

#17. It means leaving behind your physical body. Leaving the cage of your physical flesh, breaking free of the chains, and letting pure logic soar. Giving a natural life to logic. That's the core of free thought.

Haruki Murakami

#18. Skepticism is my nature. Free Thought is my methodology. Agnosticism is my conclusion. Atheism is my opinion. Humanitarianism is my motivation.

Jerry DeWitt

#19. It occurs to Blanche that English doesn't have French's useful distinction between libre, meaning that something's unconstrained, and gratuit, meaning that it costs nothing. Free thought, free speech, free love: the English word that Arthur was so fond of obscures the price of things.

Emma Donoghue

#20. Dogma is a defence against the brain's capacity for free thought based on the fear that such thought might lead to a scary place.

Joe Blow

#21. Free thought, free speech and a free press.

Anne Royall

#22. The First Amendment isn't about free thought and free opinion and free belief. The First Amendment is about free exercise
the carrying into practice of religious principles, and beliefs, and convictions.

Alan Keyes

#23. Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.
[The One Un-American Act, Speech to the Author's Guild Council in New York, on receiving the 1951 Lauterbach Award (December 3, 1952)]

William O. Douglas

#24. The stony-minded orthodox were right in fearing the first movement of new knowledge and free thought. It has gone on, and will go on, irresistibly, until some day we shall have no respect for an alleged "truth" which cannot stand the full blaze of knowledge, the full force of active thought.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#25. It should seem that Negroes, of all Americans, would be found in the Free-thought fold, since they have suffered more than any other class of Americans from the dubious blessings of Christianity.

Hubert Harrison

#26. What is now called free thought is valued, not because it is free thought, but because it is freedom from thought; because it is free thoughtlessness.

G.K. Chesterton

#27. To those who are trained in science, creationism seems a bad dream, a sudden coming back to life of a nightmare, a renewed march of an Army of the Night risen to challenge free thought and enlightenment.

Isaac Asimov

#28. I want to find my golden joy," I said.
The baron laughed loudly. "Splendid," he said. "But what does that mean to you
your golden joy?"
"The golden joy," I replied, "is when a peculiar flight of free thought makes it possible to see the beauty of life. Am I making myself clear?

Victor Pelevin

#29. It is our attitude toward free thought and free expression that will determine our fate. There must be no limit on the range of temperate discussion, no limits on thought. No subject must be taboo. No censor must preside at our assemblies.

William O. Douglas

#30. Only those who have lived all their lives under the dark clouds of vague, undefined fears can appreciate the joy of a doubting soul suddenly born into the kingdom of reason and free thought.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#31. We live in a nation where education and free thought are tantamount to treason, and I have to ask, under these circumstances, is treason such a bad thing?

Michel Templet

#32. We, when we sow the seeds of doubt deeper than the most up-to-date and modish free-thought has ever dreamed of doing, we well know what we are about. Only out of radical skepsis, out of moral chaos, can the Absolute spring, the anointed Terror of which the time has need.

Thomas Mann

#33. The story of the decadence of the cathedral as a moral power, a spiritual energizer in civilization, is the sad but inevitable story of dogmatism. It is the story of the struggle of free thought with bigotry, religion making common cause with the wrong side.

Jenkin Lloyd Jones

#34. the subversion of free speech and free thought are the worst forms of subversion.

William Douglas

#35. Where thought is free in its range, we need never fear to hazard what is good in itself.

Thomas Jefferson

#36. Chosen to hold; and therefore they are of our own ordering; and therefore there is perfect justice in the universe. No suffering for another man's original sin, but the reaping of a harvest that we ourselves have sown. We have free will, but our free will lies in our choice of thought.

Emmet Fox

#37. When it is mid week, pause and ponder! The very single days we disregard are what become the very years we wished to have used effectively and efficiently. If we disregard today, we shall remember our had I know tomorrow. Time changes therefore think of the changing times.

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

#38. I'm not the type who spends his free time in training camp playing with his Playstation or playing cards on trips. The other players thought it was odd: There he is, reading again.

Oliver Kahn

#39. I was let go after one of the doughnut girls caught me debating the varying merits of the free toys with a four-year-old. What can I say? She was a smart four-year-old. I also thought the Sleeping Beautys were sappy.

Jojo Moyes

#40. I thought I had to show people that I would get in early, stay late or even all night, work on holidays. I didn't want to be the rich kid who was along for a free ride.

Maria Shriver

#41. The thought of only being a creature of the present and the past was troubling. I longed for a future too, with hope in it. The desire to be free, awakened my determination to act, to think, and to SPEAK.

Frederick Douglass

#42. I thought that you had stood up for the free will & rights of humans in this town."
"Depends on the human," Claire said. "As far as I know, Hitler had a heartbeat, and I wouldn't vote him to be in charge.

Rachel Caine

#43. Nana acts like a stray cat, wild, free, and proud ... But inside her heart, she houses a wound. Dense as I am, i thought that. This trait of hers was a part of her charm as well..but she never realized how much pain it brought her ... -Nana Komatsu

Ai Yazawa

#44. The soul, cramped among the petty vexations of Earth, needs to keep its windows constantly open to the invigorating air of large and free ideas: and what thought is so grand as that of an ever-present God, in whom all that is vital in humanity breathes and grows?

Lucy Larcom

#45. Yet the ivory gods, And the ebony gods, And the gods of diamond-jade, Are only silly puppet gods That people themselves Have made.-

Langston Hughes

#46. We're not mindless golems, designed to think exactly the same thing. To try to suppress those thoughts is no better than slavery, and being free to say what you want, write what you want or draw what you want, as long as it doesn't offend anyone... That's no freedom at all.

T.J. Dixon

#47. Travel is sold as freedom, but we were about as free as lab rats. This is how they'll manage the next Holocaust, I thought, as I shuffled forward in my stockinged feet: they'll simply issue us with air tickets and we'll do whatever we're told

Robert Harris

#48. Life is the sum of habits, only occasionally disturbed by a thought.

Anonymous

#49. Too commonly sex does not have the dignity of a sacramental event because sex is thought to be the means of the search for self rather than the expression and communication of one who has already found himself, and is free from resort to sex in the frantic pursuit of his own identity.

William Stringfellow

#50. Bring your mind to noble silence. Unify your mind in noble silence. Concentrate your mind in noble silence ... Enter into rapture and pleasure born of silence derived of concentration and awareness that is free from thought and fabrication.

Gautama Buddha

#51. The moon should be colonised, I thought. Mankind should seek a happier beginning, and humans should be free to stroll hand in hand regardless of their weight and orientation.

Rawi Hage

#52. People, if you have any prayers,
Say prayers for me:
And lay me under a Christian stone
In that lost land I thought my own,
To wait till the holy horn is blown,
And all poor men are free.

G.K. Chesterton

#53. The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has - from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness.

Christopher Hitchens

#54. If thought makes free, so does the moral sentiment. The mixtures of spiritual chemistry refuse to be analyzed.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#55. For a scientist must indeed be freely imaginative and yet skeptical, creative and yet a critic. There is a sense in which he must be free, but another in which his thought must be very precisely regimented; there is poetry in science, but also a lot of bookkeeping.

Peter Medawar

#56. The truth is there's always been someone to tell me what to do. The church. The people who I work for. The caseworker. And I can't stand the idea of being alone. I can't bear the thought of being free.
Survivor

Chuck Palahniuk

#57. Free and profound thought, which strives towards the comprehension of life, and a complete scorn for the foolish vanity of the world - man has never known anything higher than these two blessings.

Anton Chekhov

#58. When I was 14-15
There was nothing to my life
but dancing and sex
I'd go to night clubs and dance
Then I'd meet someone and have sex
it was Fine and easy
nothing to do
BUT Think with my body
like a bird
I Thought I was Free
TrAcey Emin

Tracey Emin

#59. Death of a parent, he wrote, despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago.

Joan Didion

#60. (...) he was beginning to be himself. And now he wanted madly to be free to go on. A home, his work, and absolute freedom to move and to be, in her, with her, this was his passionate desire. He thought in a kind of ecstasy, living an hour of painful intensity.

D.H. Lawrence

#61. No matter what they say, we aren't free if we can't make our own choices.

Grace Fiorre

#62. When I was a kid, I used to try and hit every ball out of the ground. After playing one-day cricket and Test cricket, I never thought I'd get a chance to play like that again, ever. Twenty20 has given me the opportunity of playing like a kid again. I can just feel free and go out there and hit.

Yuvraj Singh

#63. Study: 60% of young Americans plan to buy firearms. The other 40% were confused, saying they thought they were free under Obamacare.

Fred Thompson

#64. Dare to be free, dare to go as far as your thought leads, and dare to carry that out in your life.

Swami Vivekananda

#65. Each time I saw a cliff, I wondered whether I could free solo it. My life shaped itself around the understanding that falling means I die. To break the paradigm I had to empty out my essence, rummaging for fundamentals I thought were gone forever.

Dean Potter

#66. Be free from grief not through insensibility like the irrational animals, nor through want of thought like the foolish, but like a man of virtue by having reason as the consolation of grief.

Epictetus

#67. I could never stay long enough on the shore; the tang of the untainted, fresh, and free sea air was like a cool, quieting thought.

Helen Keller

#68. Biological behavior can be controlled by invisible forces, including thought, as well as it can be controlled by physical molecules like penicillin, a fact that provides the scientific underpinning for pharmaceutical-free energy medicine.

Bruce H. Lipton

#69. To meditate what you need to do is free yourself from your ideas and your thoughts. All of the higher dimensional planes, the higher realities, the infinite cosmos itself is beyond thought.

Frederick Lenz

#70. Speaking of Twitter, I don't even know if I composed a blog entry in 2009, as I was too busy parceling my every thought into cute 140-character sound bites. I used to only worry about being pithy for a living; now some of my best lines are wasted on a free app!

Diablo Cody

#71. We teach people in order to open up their minds and release their captive powers. But we cannot predict the result. Freedom - we free their minds from superstition. We give the people the keys of the future to act therein as they wish.

Tayeb Salih

#72. You have accused me of upsetting order by my free drinks, and I have showed you that there is a more dreadful fermentation in the Sermon on the Mount than in my beer-barrels. Christ thought it in the irresponsibility of His omnipotence.

W.B.Yeats

#73. This wasn't the person he'd thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he'd been free to choose, but there was something comforting and liberating about being an actual definite someone, rather than a collection of contradictory potential someones.

Jonathan Franzen

#74. I met Clinton at a benefit for teachers, which was a very good charity, but I met him for about 90 seconds, and I thought it was important to meet the leader of the free world. So I stood next to him for a photograph, and then apparently that's all it takes.

Julie Bowen

#75. Martha Quest, who thought of herself as so adventurous, so free and unbounded - the fact was, even the idea of picking up a telephone and making herself known to a new person troubled her: she made excuses, she could not do it.

Doris Lessing

#76. I did not have any philosophy at all when I wrote the first novel. I was just wanting to capture experiences that I thought would be inspiring for Indians who are trying to break free from the very high-pressured family environments and do their own thing.

Karan Bajaj

#77. I always thought a person's Gift reflected something about that person and all I can think is that my Gift reflects my desires, and my desires are to be totally wild, totally free.

Sally Green

#78. Everything has boundaries. The same holds true with thought. You shouldn't fear boundaries, but you should not be afraid of destroying them. That's what is most important if you want to be free: respect for and exasperation with boundaries.

Haruki Murakami

#79. Thought isn't a form of energy. So how on Earth can it change material processes? That question has still not been answered.

Vladimir I. Vernadsky

#80. I'm learning to hunt with rifles, because if you think about it, hunting gets you the healthiest meat - organic, free-range food. It's a totally yuppie spin on what I thought was kind of a redneck occupation.

Sarah Wayne Callies

#81. We got rid of colonialism, we got rid of slavery, and we got rid of apartheid everyone thought each one of them was impossible. Let's take the next impossible, do it with joy and get it finished with and create a world free from poverty. Let us create the world of our choice.

Muhammad Yunus

#82. The man who can keep order can rule the world, but the man who can bear disorder is truly free.

Gillian Cross

#83. It's clear that other problems such as [ ... ] the domination of business over government, science, thought, and society, are much bigger than non-free software.

Richard Stallman

#84. The most important impact of script on human history is precisely this: it has gradually changed the way humans think and view the world. Free association and holistic thought have given way to compartmentalisation and bureaucracy. The

Yuval Noah Harari

#85. They wish not to become adult - not to have to accept our kind of responsibility. And yet like all children, they want to be thought grown up, and free to do what they think are grown up things. And that leads sometimes to tragedy and sometimes to the aftermath of tragedy.

Agatha Christie

#86. A mind cluttered with past thoughts, old conversations and unhealed wounds can only serve to drag us down and compromise our ability to live free.

Shannon Tanner

#87. I wandered away on a glorious botanical and geological excursion, which has lasted nearly fifty years and is not yet completed, always happy and free, poor and rich, without thought of a diploma or of making a name, urged on and on through endless, inspiring Godful beauty.

John Muir

#88. If you find yourself plagued by a recurrent worry, train yourself to think of something else. Your conscious mind can concentrate on only one thought at a time, and driving the negativity away will free you up to move forward again.

Harvey MacKay

#89. She walks to a table
She walk to table
She is walking to a table
She walk to table now
What difference does it make
What difference it make
In Nature, no completeness
No sentence really complete thought
Language, like woman,
Look best when free, undressed.

Wang Ping

#90. It almost occurred;
It almost got hold of my purity,
Just as it headed for the war within my being,
I fed it a light so bright;
It thought it almost had control of me.
Depression is just a dis-ease,
So; Let your mind be free

Nikki Rowe

#91. But the path of self-purification is hard and steep. To attain to perfect purity one has to become absolutely passion-free in thought, speech and action; to rise above the opposing currents of love and hatred, attachment and repulsion. I

Mahatma Gandhi

#92. They thought man was a creature of rapacious self-interest, and yet they wanted him to be free- free, in essence, to contend, to engage in an umpired strife, to use property to get property.

Richard Hofstadter

#93. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, Thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought is great and swift and free.

Bertrand Russell

#94. Perhaps, he thought, as he turned back, that was what Augustus wanted: just to be free for a few days, just to saddle his horse and ride.

Larry McMurtry

#95. Watch me go. Watch me. Because you said i couldn't. Because you thought I wouldn't. Go on, cry now. Cry.

Kellie Elmore

#96. Lifetime corporate employment is dead; we're all free agents now, managing our own careers across multiple jobs and companies. And because today's primary currency is information, a wide-reaching network is one of the surest ways to become and remain thought leaders of our respective fields.

Keith Ferrazzi

#97. Better to stay alive," I said. "At least while there's a chance to get free." I thought of the sleeping pills in my bag and wondered just how great a hypocrite I was. It was so easy to advise other people to live with their pain.

Octavia E. Butler

#98. I had some short struggle in my mind whether I should resign my lover or my liberty, but this lasted not long. I found myself as free as air and could not bear the thought of putting myself in any man's power for life only from a present capricious inclination.

Sarah Fielding

#99. We thought sex was free. Sex is not free. There's a price to be paid emotionally, physically, even legally. Sex isn't a casual thing. It's a huge thing.

William H. Macy

#100. I froze in time! And I thought My God ... I'm free!

Arlo Guthrie