Top 66 Quotes About Intellectual Freedom
#1. The problems of financing the universities and their intellectual freedom, threatened by political and bureaucratic interference, are problems which are invariant under the ism transformations: socialism, communism, capitalism, or any other ism or ology.
Serge Lang
#2. Censorship in the schools that denies intellectual freedom to teachers robs the student of that same freedom. And the freedom to learn is clearly no less precious than the freedom to teach.
Sterling M. McMurrin
#3. We must understand that when a society undermines intellectual freedom for its own purposes it is absolutely morally bad, but when it represses biological freedom for its own purposes it is absolutely morally good.
Robert M. Pirsig
#4. It is impossible to stand for intellectual freedom without grappling with censorship.
Frances M. Jones
#5. Intellectual freedom means the right to re-examine much that has been long taken for granted. A free man must be a reasoning man, and he must dare doubt what a legislative or electoral majority may most passionately assert.
Robert H. Jackson
#6. Intellectual freedom is the only guarantee of a scientific - democratic approach to politics, economic development, and culture.
Andrei Sakharov
#7. Nearly all people stand in great horror of annihilation, and yet to give up your individuality is to annihilate yourself. Mental slavery is mental death, and every man who has given up his intellectual freedom is the living coffin of his dead soul.
Robert G. Ingersoll
#8. It is out of character for a country that prides itself on intellectual freedom to put the education of its young in the hands of the state.
David Kelley
#9. To curtail free expression strikes twice at intellectual freedom, for whoever deprives another of the right to state unpopular views necessarily deprives others of the right to listen to those views.
C. Vann Woodward
#10. I certainly do have this feeling of affection for the absolute sense of intellectual freedom that exists as a live nerve, a live wire, right through the center of American life.
Norman Mailer
#11. By the known rules of ancient liberty. The word ancient emphasises the fact that intellectual freedom is a deep-rooted tradition without which our characteristic western culture could only doubtfully exist.
George Orwell
#12. The Chinese have made a faustian pact with the government, agreeing to forsake demands for political and intellectual freedom in exchange for more material comfort. They live prosperous lives in which any expression of pain is forbidden.
Ma Jian
#13. The genius of the American Founders was to create an intricate system of balanced powers both within the state and between state and society - a system that has fostered unprecedented political, social, and intellectual freedom.
Nancy Pearcey
#14. Religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.
Philip Pullman
#15. For they amount to this: that if we are to produce a society of educated people, fitted to preserve their intellectual freedom amid the complex pressures of our modern society, we must turn back the wheel of progress some four or five hundred years,
Dorothy L. Sayers
#16. Intellectual freedom depends upon material things.
Virginia Woolf
#17. The shimmering, lucid tones and silver melancholy of I'll Be Right There give readers a South Korea peopled with citizens fighting for honor and intellectual freedom, and longing for love and solace. Kyung-Sook Shin's characters have unforgettable voices-it's no wonder she has so many fans.
Susan Straight
#18. My father had retained an emotional affection for the ceremonial of his parental home, without allowing it to influence his intellectual freedom.
Franz Boas
#19. In the general tendency toward specialization, philosophy too has established itself as a specialized discipline, one purified of all specific content. In so doing, philosophy has denied its own constitutive concept: the intellectual freedom that does not obey the dictates of specialized knowledge.
Theodor Adorno
#21. I want to work with non-profits that stimulate growth to the community. Whether it is economic growth, intellectual, or freedom.
Gbenga Akinnagbe
#22. Having the freedom to read and the freedom to choose is one of the best gifts my parents ever gave me.
Judy Blume
#23. If we want to resist the powers that threaten to suppress intellectual and individual freedom, we must be clear what is at stake," he said. "Without such freedom there would have been no Shakespeare, no Goethe, no Newton, no Faraday, no Pasteur, no Lister." Freedom was a foundation for creativity.
Walter Isaacson
#24. Women's Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom.
Adrienne Rich
#25. I've always stressed the value of autonomy for intellectual and moral development. Autonomy provides us with a sphere of discretion which we all require.
Brian D'Ambrosio
#26. Well, the man who first translated the bible into English was burned at the stake, and they've been at it ever since. Must be all that adultery, murder and incest. But not to worry. It's back on the shelves.
Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
#27. Banning books is just another form of bullying. It's all about fear and an assumption of power. The key is to address the fear and deny the power.
James Howe
#28. What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
Salman Rushdie
#29. Her Uncle Jaime felt that people never read what did not interest them and that if it interested them that meant they were sufficiently mature to read it.
Isabel Allende
#30. The goal of intellectual life should be to see and understand what is true, not merely to adhere to a prevailing orthodoxy.
Jeffrey Tucker
#31. Yes, books are dangerous. They should be dangerous - they contain ideas.
Pete Hautman
#32. For a man of my generation, our century has been a long intellectual and political struggle in favor of freedom.
Octavio Paz
#33. I think the freedom to express one's views is more important than intellectual property.
Shepard Fairey
#34. Eternal vigilance, as they say, is the price of freedom. Add intellectual integrity to the cost basis.
Stephen Jay Gould
#35. There is nothing wrong with intellectual differences flowing from freedom of thought as long as such differences remain confined to intellectual debates.
Pervez Musharraf
#36. If only everyone could know and live with their inner craziness. Would the world be a worse place for it? No, people would be fairer and happier.
Paulo Coelho
#37. FREEDOM OF SPEECH is the air that any thinker breathes; it's the fuel that ignites the fire of an intellectual's thoughts.
Raif Badawi
#38. Next time you open the paper, and you see an intellectual property decision, a telecoms decision, it's not about something small and technical. It is about the future of the freedom to be as social beings with each other, and the way information, knowledge and culture will be produced.
Yochai Benkler
#39. Communism everywhere has paid the price of rigidity and dogmatism. Freedom has the strength of compassion and flexibility. It has, above all, the strength of intellectual honesty.
Robert Kennedy
#40. Dillon now had the freedom to fulfill the yearnings of his intellectual desires and pleasures. Now he'd show the world the magnitude of human capabilites when morality did not stand in the way.
Jill Thrussell
#41. In order to become whole we must try, in a long process, to discover our own personal truth, a truth that may cause pain before giving us a new sphere of freedom. If we choose instead to content ourselves with intellectual "wisdom," we will remain in the sphere of illusion and self-deception.
Alice Miller
#42. Today in the west the word 'guru' has come to mean someone who leads a cult, someone who deprives others of their intellectual or spiritual freedom and rips them off financially.
Frederick Lenz
#43. What we call the freedom of the individual is not just the luxury of one intellectual to write what he likes to write but his being a voice which can speak for those who are silent.
Stephen Spender
#44. I hate it that Americans are taught to fear some books and some ideas as though they were diseases.
Kurt Vonnegut
#45. To answer brutality with brutality is to admit one's moral and intellectual bankruptcy.
Mahatma Gandhi
#46. I have long been aware that when an independent intellectual stands up to an autocratic state, step one toward freedom is often a step into prison. Now I am taking that step; and true freedom is that much nearer.
Liu Xia
#47. I found out that total creativity involves a certain intellectual rebellion - not to become a criminal, but somehow. to be totally creating, you have to do things that are a little bit forbidden. You have to feel free, and we know freedom is a hard thing to get.
Philippe Petit
#48. Intellectual and cultural freedom is the most important single precondition for the breakdown of the kinds of tyrannical and totalitarian systems that periodically threaten us.
James H. Billington
#49. These men were religious when the spirit of religion was buried in forms and ceremonies, and when the priesthood had armed itself with the civil powers to put down all opposition, and suppress all freedom, intellectual, civil, and religious.
Ethan A. Hitchcock
#50. Freedom would mean rest, artistic achievement, the intellectual fulfilment of my being.
Pessoa, Fernando
#51. Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life--the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within--can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.
George Eliot
#52. Insight into universal nature provides an intellectual delight and sense of freedom that no blows of fate and no evil can destroy.
Alexander Von Humboldt
#53. TV takes away our freedom to have whatever thoughts we want. So do photographs, movies, and the Internet. They provide us with more intellectual stimuli, but they construct a lower, harder ceiling.
Chuck Klosterman
#54. Strait-jacket and chain-gang procedures had to be done away with if there was to a chance for growth of individuals in the intellectual springs of freedom without which there is no assurance of genuine and continued normal growth.
John Dewey
#55. Collectivism, as an intellectual power and a moral ideal, is dead. But freedom and individualism, and their political expression, capitalism, have not yet been discovered.
Ayn Rand
#56. Banning books gives us silence when we need speech. It closes our ears when we need to listen. It makes us blind when we need sight.
Stephen Chbosky
#57. The cultivation of a willingness to defy, debunk, or just plain old disappoint one's parents, that is the absolute precondition, now more than ever, for intellectual and emotional freedom.
Julie Lythcott-Haims
#58. I think the universities have co-opted the intellectual, by and large. But there is an emerging intellectual set coming out of Washington think tanks now. There are people who are leaving the universities and working for the government or in think tanks, simply looking for freedom.
Richard Rodriguez
#59. The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion. In the long run it will create a generation incapable of appreciating the difference between independence of thought and subservience.
Henry Steele Commager
#60. To sing about freedom and to pray for its coming is not enough. Freedom must be actualized in history by oppressed peoples who accept the intellectual challenge to analyze the world for the purpose of changing it.
James H. Cone
#61. The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility.
Anais Nin
#62. The teacher who allows his scholars the freedom of the city of books is at liberty to be their guide, philosopher and friend; and is no longer the mere instrument of forcible intellectual feeding.
Charlotte Mason
#63. If freedom is to flourish the philosophic foundations of a free society must be kept a living intellectual issue and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of the liveliest minds.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#64. Freedom in intellectual work is found to be the basis of internal discipline.
Maria Montessori
#65. The history of intellectual growth and discovery clearly demonstrates the need for unfettered freedom, the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable.
C. Vann Woodward
#66. My parents were lured to America by the democracy here promised. In our family, freedom was a word to conjure by. Hoping for larger privileges for the growing family of children, they brought them to the New World, the world of many intellectual as well as material advantages.
Jenkin Lloyd Jones
