"Free thought" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... streets; but I tell you Boston has opened, and kept open, more turnpikes that lead straight to free thought and free speech and free deeds than any other city of live men or dead men,—I don't care how broad their streets are, ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... disentangle for ourselves (by a most difficult and uncertain process) the "true" sayings of Jesus, is surely self-refuting. Fourthly, if I must sit in judgment on the claims of Jesus to be the true Messiah and Son of God, how can I concentrate all my free thought into that one act, and thenceforth abandon free thought? This appears a moral suicide, whether Messiah or the Pope is the object whom we first criticize, in order to instal him over us, and then, for ever after, refuse to criticize. In short, we cannot build ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... almost contemporaneous, moments in the evolution of the Italian genius. Michael Angelo was essentially an artist, living in the prime of the Renaissance. Campanella was a philosopher, born when the Counter-Reformation was doing all it could to blight the free thought of the sixteenth century; and when the modern spirit of exact enquiry, in a few philosophical martyrs, was opening a new stage for European science. The one devoted all his mental energies to the ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... La Rochefoucauld, 'but there is no elevation without some merit.' Such we find him in his earlier essays, while he had as yet only grasped at the Pantheistic wing of the Egyptian globe. In England, in 1848, four thousand people crowded Exeter Hall, to hear the champion of free thought from America. In Poland, men who knew him only by some fragments in a Polish review, considered him the thinker of the age. His courage was the talisman that won him admiration, and his earnestness, visible through the veil of arrogance and petty ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... a failing creed has lost the power to oppose. And now, day by day, that progress becomes swifter; now, day by day, the opposition becomes fainter, and soon, passing over the ruins of a shattered religion, Free Thought shall plant the white banner of Liberty in the midst of the temple of Humanity; that temple which, long desecrated by priests and overshadowed by gods, shall then be consecrated for evermore to the service of its rightful owner, and shall be filled ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... You may know the kind. And once or twice a woman shared his walks, A girl of twenty with a brown boy's face, And hair brown as a thrush or as a nut, Thick eyebrows, glinting eyes—" "You have said enough. A pair,—free thought, free love,—I know the breed: I shall not mix my fancies up with them." "You please yourself. I should prefer the truth Or nothing. Here, in fact, is nothing at all Except a silent place that once rang loud, And trees ...
— Last Poems • Edward Thomas
... astronomy and of geology have triumphed over universal opposition. They were once anathematized as 'Infidel;' they are now accepted as axiomatic." When an official of the Church of England of the high standing of Canon Farrar comes out so boldly in the interest of free thought and free criticism on lines hitherto held to be too sacred for human reason to cross, it is one of the "signs of the times," and a most hopeful one ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... I was startled to see such summary action taken in regard to unbelievers. At first I prided myself that I belonged to a world of free thought and free speech, but when I saw the magnetic effect of these Jupiter regulations I was in doubt as to the superiority of our ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... did not know, in the strongest language ever put upon paper? Whoever admits the infallibility of a man becomes thereby incapable of instructing others. Whoever denies his own reason will soon proscribe free thought. The phalansterians would not fail to do it if they had the power. Let them condescend to reason, let them proceed systematically, let them give us demonstrations instead of revelations, and we will listen willingly. Then let them organize manufactures, ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... There are beings who have the privilege of passing among men like beneficent stars, whose light illumines the mind, while its rays send a glow to the heart. D'Arthez was one of those beings. A writer who rises to his level, accustoms himself to free thought, and forgets that in society all things cannot be said; it is impossible for such a man to observe the restraint of persons who live in the world perpetually; but as his eccentricities of thought bore the mark of originality, no one felt inclined to complain. This zest, ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... this man stood for truth and justice as against hypocrisy and oppression. Folly and freedom are better far than smugness and persecution. Byron stood for the rights of the individual, for the right of free speech and free thought: and he stood for political and physical freedom, long before abolition societies became popular. He sided with the people; his heart went out to the oppressed; and all of his fruitless gropings and stumblings were a reaching out for tenderness ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... preparing a discourse on free thought which he will read at the Senate a propos of the press law. He has ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... he is coming, coming, To help, to guide, to save. Though I hear no martial drumming, And see no flags that wave. But the great soul travail of woman, And the bold free thought unfurled, Are heralds that say he is on the way— The coming man of ...
— The Kingdom of Love - and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox |
