Top 100 Quotes About The Freedom Of Thought
#1. People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
Soren Kierkegaard
#2. Reason like science, grows by way of mutual criticism; the only possible way of planning its growth is to develop those institutions that safeguard. the freedom of thought
Karl Popper
#3. The freedom of thought is a sacred right of every individual man, and diversity will continue to increase with the progress, refinement, and differentiation of the human intellect.
Felix Adler
#5. My fear was actually the cause of my inability to trust people. Fear of being deceived. Fear of being lied to. My fear of people was stealing from me the freedom of thought.
Otsuichi
#6. The freedom of thought and expression is one of the most sacred rights in this country.
Eliot Engel
#8. Whatever the rationale, the suppression of unorthodox cancer therapies and the sustained persecution of their proponents by government and colleagues runs counter to freedom of thought, much less freedom of choice.
Marilyn Ferguson
#9. The moment of realization is: When what you thought you couldn't be without, becomes a part of the past, rather than the start of the future.
Melody Carstairs
#10. 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
#11. Freedom is the freedom to say two plus two equals four.
George Orwell
#12. The ending of sorrow is the beginning of wisdom. Knowledge is always within the shadow of ignorance. Meditation is freedom from thought and a movement in the ecstasy of truth. Meditation is explosion of intelligence.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#13. Actual freedom is freedom from dependency, attachment, from the craving for experience. Freedom from the very structure of thought is to be a light to oneself.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#14. 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.
#15. The development of science and of the creative activities of the spirit requires a freedom that consists in the independence of thought from the restrictions of authoritarian and social prejudice.
Albert Einstein
#16. The first step away from being manipulated, and towards a more autonomous outlook, is to stand back from a set of responses and think.
Jonathan Glover
#17. Those who take refuge behind theological barbed wire fences, quite often wish they could have more freedom of thought, but fear the change to the great ocean of truth as they would a cold bath.
Luther Burbank
#18. I remember an immense feeling of possibility at the idea, as if I had been ushered into a vast building filled with closed doors and had been given leave to open any I liked. There were more doors than one person could ever open in a lifetime, I thought (and still think).
Stephen King
#19. Her ambitions were no longer specifically for happiness or financial security or freedom from disease (thought they included all three), but for something more general: the continuing certainty of things. She needed to know that she would carry on being herself.
Julian Barnes
#20. (...) 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
#21. Through knowledge and understanding we will drive from the temple of freedom all who seek to establish over us thought control - whether they be agents of a foreign power or demagogues thirsty for personal power and public notice.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#22. I know the difference between reality and fantasy. Those with sick fantasies who know and respect this difference are much less dangerous than those with no fantasies at all, but who can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality.
T.J. Dixon
#23. Considering the great importance to the public liberty of the freedom of the press, and the difficulty of submitting it to very precise rules, the laws have thought it less mischievous to give greater scope to its freedom than to the restraint of it.
Thomas Jefferson
#24. The fortune my spirit is not to be blown into coins of brass and flung to the winds as alms for the poor of the spirit. I guard my treasures: my thought, my will, my freedom. And the greatest of these is freedom.
Ayn Rand
#25. No book on this planet can give you the description of terms like religion, spirituality, divinity unless you discover it within the realm of your own mind.
Abhijit Naskar
#26. We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love.
Salman Rushdie
#27. Freedom of speech is not only the right to say as you please, it is also the right to have what you say contested, and where it does not accord with reason - refuted, or with sense - ridiculed.
David Joseph Cribbin
#28. The dictator says "You are allowed to think as you want" but never write it down or talk about it. If you cross these borders we cannot guarantee your security
Bangambiki Habyarimana
#29. 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
#30. I talk about freedom from the Rat Race, and they focus on toilets. That is the thought pattern that keeps most people poor. They criticize instead of analyze.
Robert T. Kiyosaki
#31. I walked slowly to enjoy this freedom, and when I came out of the mountains, I saw the sky over the prairie, and I thought that if heaven was real, I hoped it was a place I never had to go, for this earth was greater than any paradise.
Daniel J. Rice
#32. Let's stop and think for a moment. Is sacrifice a virtue? Can a man sacrifice his integrity? His honor? His freedom? His ideal? His convictions? The honesty of his feeling? The independence of his thought?
Ayn Rand
#33. The moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.
Salman Rushdie
#34. How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.
Soren Kierkegaard
#35. 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
#36. Books of the sages of the ages reflect upon in stages; like honey their words on the tongue give due savour."
{Source: A Green Desert Father}
Richard Mc Sweeney
#37. Think for yourself and let others enjoy the privilege of doing so too.
Voltaire
#38. MANDELA: a man deemed to be the greatest icon in Africa. his life thought me couple of lessons that always inspires me to strive hard for respect and to make an impact on humanity. may his footsteps continue to live for ever on the sands of time.
Victor Adeagbo
#39. The man who can keep order can rule the world, but the man who can bear disorder is truly free.
Gillian Cross
#40. When a people holds onto its language, it holds onto a semblance of freedom, like a man who holds onto his independence when he retains his own way of thinking. Language is the thought of a people.
Jose Rizal
#41. 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
#42. Because Freedom is the most important thing on life, let me Be.
John Steinbeck
#43. Disputes among natural philosophers are of use to science, as the quarrels of the great, and the clamors of the little, are necessary to freedom of thought and the advancement of learning.
Hal Hellman
#44. Here is the best wish for the New Year: Let there be more freedom of thought throughout the world! Fields need rain; truths need freedom of thought!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#45. Education keeps the key of life; and liberal education insures the first conditions of freedom,
namely, adequate knowledge and accustomed thought.
Julia Ward Howe
#46. You can't pick and choose which types of freedom you want to defend. You must defend all of it or be against all of it.
Scott Howard Phillips
#48. But slaves that once conceive the glowing thought Of freedom, in that hope itself possess All that the contest calls for; spirit, strength, The scorn of danger, and united hearts, The surest presage of the good they seek.
William Cowper
#49. See we just had a misunderstanding. I thought we lived in the U.S. of A., the United States of America. But actually we live in the U.S. of A., the United States of Advertising. Freedom of expression is guaranteed? If you've got the money!
Bill Hicks
#50. The more people come together, the more borders will be opened and people and opinions get together, the more unrenouncable tolerance will be a fundamental part of our social life. Without tolerance there is no religious liberty, no freedom of conscience and no freedom of thought.
Thomas Klestil
#51. Everyone is by absolute natural right the master of his own thoughts, and thus utter failure will attend any attempt in a commonwealth to force men to speak only as prescribed by the sovereign despite their different and opposing opinions.
Baruch Spinoza
#52. There are necessary evils. Money is an important thing in terms of representing freedom in our world. And now I have a daughter to think about. It's really the first time I've thought about the future and what it could be.
Johnny Depp
#53. Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.
Alfred Whitney Griswold
#54. Tolerance and freedom of thought are the veritable antidotes to religious fanaticism.
Baron D'Holbach
#55. The great gift of American democracy is freedom to think, act, and carry out our lives in a manner that imbues meaning not only to our own life but enhances other people's lives through our everyday actions.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#56. The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.
Joseph Heller
#57. Liberty of thought soon shrivels without freedom of expression. Nor can truth be pursued in an atmosphere hostile to the endeavor or under dangers which are hazarded only by heroes.
Felix Frankfurter
#58. America's greatest contribution to the world is its concept of democracy, its concept of freedom, freedom of action, freedom of speech, and freedom of thought.
Benazir Bhutto
#59. Of all the religions in the world, perhaps the religion of liberty is the only faith capable of purity.
Tiffany Madison
#60. HOW TO MAKE A REVOLUTIONARY CONSCIOUSNESS IS: educate yourself. On the train, for example, read the same two pages of Das Kapital over and over, willing them to make sense.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#61. But we do not merely protest; we make renewed demand for freedom in that vast kingdom of the human spirit where freedom has ever had the right to dwell:the expressing of thought to unstuffed ears; the dreaming of dreams by untwisted souls.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#62. I used to wear sleeveless T-shirts all the time on court, but now I've got a brand new look - I've moved on to polo shirts. Sleeveless T-shirts give you real freedom of movement and they keep you cooler in matches, but I just thought it was time for a change.
Rafael Nadal
#63. When the Internet first came, I thought it was just the beacon of freedom. People could communicate with anyone, anywhere, and nobody could stop it.
Steve Wozniak
#64. This was freedom; to feel what the heart desired with no thought to the opinion of the rest ... She was free, for love liberates.
Paulo Coelho
#65. A man is allowed sufficient freedom of thought, provided he knows how to choose his subject properly ... But the scene is changed as you come homeward, and atheism or treason may be the names given in Britain to what would be reason and truth if asserted in China.
Edmund Burke
#66. They [the Pilgrims] believed in freedom of thought for themselves and for all other people who believed exactly as they did.
Will Cuppy
#67. Why is freedom such a hard sell? That's the question. In this country, why has the idea of individual liberty and responsibility become such a hard sell? That's something I never thought would happen here.
Rush Limbaugh
#68. Intelligent thinking means an increment of freedom in action-an emancipation from chance and fatality. 'Thought' represents the suggestion of a way of response that is different from that which would have been followed if intelligent observation had not effected an inference as to the future.
John Dewey
#69. The thought of a happiness that comes from outside the person, brings him sadness. But the recognition in the value of one's will and the freedom granted by its uplifting, brings great joy.
Abraham Isaac Kook
#70. To break free from this vexatious and awful never-ending cycle, this flood of outrageous thoughts, and to long for nothing more than simply to sleep
how clean, how pure, the mere thought of it is exhilarating.
Osamu Dazai
#71. Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action - Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake. This
Rabindranath Tagore
#72. It was a thought, that. Not to attach yourself to a man, but to confront instead the open world, the wide fields of France and Spain, the ocean, anything. Not just to hitch a lift with the first fellow who looked as though he knew where he was going, but just to go.
Jo Baker
#73. The strength of this country lies in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights and the freedom of speech and thought.
George Soros
#74. No man owns me. All man can do is practice the timeless, criminal art of threatening to separate my soul from her physical host.
Tiffany Madison
#75. On another level this film talks about that. We had tremendous freedom while making this film. We never thought about marketing. It wasn't a film made to sell merchandise or products or to reach millions of people around the world. It was a film made to say what I really felt.
Alex Abreu
#76. Mandela's heroism is the heroism of a man who suffered so badly for what he thought of as freedom. And yet when he had the upper hand he has this incredible self-control and these incredible leadership qualities.
Bono
#77. The free-will of man cannot impune the sovereignty of God, and conversely the sovereignty of God would not impune the free-will of men.
R. Alan Woods
#78. (He) mourned mankind, and the blindness of men, who thought that the Kosmos had rules and limits that would shelter them from their own freedom. There were no shelters. There were no final purposes. Futility, and freedom, were Absolute
Bruce Sterling
#79. Every one is as much bound in thought, word, deed, and mind, as a piece of stone or this table. That I talk to you now is as rigorous in causation as that you listen to me. There is no freedom until you go beyond Maya. That is the real freedom of the soul.
Swami Vivekananda
#80. Higher level independence starts with the freedom and independence of the mind to think and act according to the highest principles of knowledge and worthy traditions of a nation.
Wan Mohd Nor Wan Daud
#81. I could only think one troubling thought: the police, the state, did the bidding of the holders of great wealth. How much freedom of speech and freedom of assembly you had depended on what class you were in.
Howard Zinn
#82. space and silence are necessary because it is only when the mind is alone, uninfluenced, untrained, not held by infinite varieties of experience, that it can come upon something totally new.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#83. Bonhoeffer thought of death as the last station on the road to freedom.
Eric Metaxas
#84. Love and Freedom of Thoughts is a fast-acting antidote against the misanthropic cold sword of mass surveillance.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
#85. I believe in the complete freedom of thought and speech - alike for the humblest man and the mightiest, and in the utmost freedom of conduct that is consistent with living in organized
society.
H.L. Mencken
#86. The ideal of progress, freedom of thought, and the decline of ecclesiastical power go together.
J. B. Bury
#87. It is one of the great ironies of corporate control that the corporate state needs the abilities of intellectuals to maintain power, yet outside of this role it refuses to permit intellectuals to think or function independently.
Chris Hedges
#88. I think that growing up in a crowded continent like Europe with an awful lot of competing claims, ideas ... cultures ... and systems of thought, we have, perforce, developed a more sophisticated notion of what the word 'freedom' means than I see much evidence of in America.
Douglas Adams
#89. We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.
Bertrand Russell
#90. 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
#91. Freedom of thought is meaningless without the freedom to act.
Marty Rubin
#92. [M]an is not permitted without censure to follow his own thoughts in the search of truth, when they lead him ever so little out of the common road.
John Locke
#93. She had thought she could make a difference. She had thought she could drive back the advancing horde - by the sheer weight of her will, if need be. It was arrogance on her part. The forces of freedom were lost.
Terry Goodkind
#94. We are so proud of our guarantees of freedom in thought and speech and worship, that, unconsciously, we are guilty of one of the greatest errors that ignorance can make - we assume our standard of values is shared by all other humans in the world.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#96. Meditation is the progressive quieting of our mind, until we reach the source of thought, which in wisdom traditions are the realm of our soul and spirit. In this domain of awareness there is infinite creativity, synchronicity, the power of intention, and freedom from limitations.
Deepak Chopra
#97. If a believer demands that I, as a nonbeliever, observe his taboos in the public domain, he is not asking for my respect, but for my submission.
Flemming Rose
#98. I want to be part of the happiness team - let's create the happiness team - from love, not greed, love of life & our planet, true & free.
Jay Woodman
#99. To the question: Wilderness, who needs it? Doc would say: Because we like the taste of freedom, comrades. Because we like the smell of danger. But, thought Hayduke, what about the smell of fear, Dad?
Edward Abbey
#100. None of us had any idea of how successful Downton was going to be. I thought I was signing up for another period drama that had a slightly modern feel. It had a freedom about it because it was coming out of the head of Julian Fellowes. Anything could happen and generally did.
Dan Stevens
