"Free thought" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... us come a step nearer home: let us consider England, and note that just the moment free thought was allowed, you find Unitarianism springing into existence. Milton was a Unitarian; Locke, one of the greatest of English philosophers, a Unitarian; Dr. Lardner, one of its most famous theological scholars, a Unitarian; Sir Isaac Newton, one of the few ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... pupil Plato had done for the youth of Greece,(19) these new academies were to do for the youth of Italy, France, England, Spain, and Germany; and, though with varying success, they have done it. The mediaeval and modern Universities have been from century to century the homes of free thought. Here the most eminent men have spent their lives, not in retailing traditional knowledge, as at school, but in extending the frontiers of science in all directions. Here, in close intercourse with their teachers, or ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... is no doubt that this study was by no means always that barren and verbal trifling which an ill-informed modern contempt is fond of representing it. It is evident that around the study of theology in the mediaeval University of Paris there worked a real ferment of thought, and very free thought. But the University of Paris culminated as the exclusive devotion to theological study declined, and culminated by virtue ...
— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker
... spirit!" interrupted Pierre, unable to restrain himself. "Oh! that is no mere innocent, passing fashion, it is a tactical device and a terrible one, an offensive return of the powers of darkness against those of light, of servitude against free thought, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... burned itself out in Spain. The peninsula had for its ruler a prince who sought his glory in smothering free thought among his own people, and in wasting his immense resources in vain efforts to repress it also outside of his own dominions through all Europe. From that hour, Spain became benumbed and estranged from all the advances of science and art, by means of which ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... sunk and disappeared. All stagnant reaction is tyrannical; and when a community has by degrees so developed itself that it wears the features of tyranny beneath the mask of freedom, when every outspoken utterance that gives uncompromising expression to free thought is frowned upon by society, by the respectable part of the press, and by many officials of the State, very unusual conditions will be needed to call forth characters and talents of the sort upon which progress in any society depends. Should such a community develop a kind of poetry, we ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... me in undertone, as if she meant the matter to go no further, was even mattering. But the solemnity of the face that looked down on the scene was spoiled by the ribbon drawn across it to fasten a wreath on the head, in the effort of some mistaken zealot of free thought to enhance its majesty by decoration. It was the moment when the society calling itself by Giordano Bruno's name was making an effort for the suppression of ecclesiastical instruction in the public schools; and on the anniversary ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... single intelligent Liberal who is not against that plebiscite?—is there any such who does not know that the appeal of the Emperor to universal suffrage and vote by ballot must result in a triumph over all the variations of free thought, by the unity which belongs to Order, represented through an able man at the head of the State? The multitude never comprehend principles; principles are complex ideas; they comprehend a single idea, and the simplest idea is, a Name that rids their action of all ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... only added mortal minors of lament and entreaty. He was a small, spare man, with a face almost as white as the vesture of his holy office. Julius glanced up at him, and for a few minutes forgot all his dreamy philosophies, aggressive free thought, and shallow infidelities. He could not resist the influences around him; and when the people rose, and the organ filled the silence with melody, and a young sweet voice ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... democratic averages is beside the point. The process of levelling up and levelling down only produces low standards. What the world needs, whether in England or America, is a new sort of aristocracy—simple, disinterested, bold, sympathetic, enthusiastic men, of clear vision and free thought. And what the democracy needs is not an envious dislike of all prominence and greatness, but an eye for all greatness, and an admiration for all courage and largeness of soul. England suspects, perhaps erroneously, ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... how 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 ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... custom. All the actions of life are to be submitted to a single rule for a single object; that gradually created the 'hereditary drill' which science teaches to be essential, and which the early instinct of men saw to be essential too. That this regime forbids free thought is not an evil; or rather, though an evil, it is the necessary basis for the greatest good; it is necessary for making the mould of civilisation, and hardening the ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... against pantheism in reading the Spanish mystics; they show no tendency to obliterate the dividing lines of personality, or to deify sinful humanity. The cause of this peculiarity is to be sought partly in the strong individualism of the Spanish character, and partly in external circumstances.[285] Free thought in Spain was so sternly repressed, that those tendencies of mystical religion which are antagonistic to Catholic discipline were never allowed to display themselves. The Spanish mystics remained orthodox Romanists, ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... great danger of confusion. In the early part of the last century, when English was undergoing what was then thought to be purification, the polite world substantially resigned is a-building to the vulgar. Toward the close of the same century, when, under the influence of free thought, it began to be felt that even ideas had a right to faithful and unequivocal representation, a just resentment of ambiguity was evidenced in the creation of is being built. The lament is too late ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... the most irreconcilable of the opponents of modern democracy, free thought, and the government which the Penguins had voluntarily given themselves. He had a vigorous and undisguised hatred for the Jews, and he worked in public and in private, night and day, for the restoration of the line of the Draconides. His ardent royalism was still ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... an outburst of free thought in Bohemia a century and a half before. John Huss, Luther's forerunner, came with a safe conduct to the Council of Constance; but the bishops ruled that safe conducts could not protect heretics. They burnt ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... man of liberal views like his wife, but this was a great secret, as free thought was not appreciated at Salerno. Consequently, any outsider would have taken the household for a truly Christian one, and the marquis took care to adopt in appearance all ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... thought, a wave of which has reached us, is undoubtedly in the direction of bringing all subjects, however sacred, to the crucial test of argument, fact and experience, and our religious guides must not think they will prevail by the exhibit of mere contemptuous indifference to the free thought that prevails around them. If our great theological schools and seats of learning are to prove themselves equal to the demands of the present day, it will be by moving out of their grooves of worn-out tradition and routine, and by enlarging their teachings so that the men they ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot
... years what I shall attempt to sketch in the third section. You must read the revolutionary movement of the later nineteenth century, darkened indeed by materialism and made mutable by fear and free thought, but full of awful vistas of an escape from the curse ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... phlegm and patience, minds apparently so slow shared with serious and concentrated ardour in the general movement of mind in Europe. Free thought there assumed the form of an universal conspiracy. It was enveloped in mystery. Learned and formal Germany liked to give even to its insurrection the appearances of science and tradition. The Egyptian initiations, mystic ceremonies of the middle age, ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... ruin, no discontinuity, no spent ball. The divine circulations never rest nor linger. Nature is the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes water and gas. The world is mind precipitated, and the volatile essence is forever escaping again into the state of free thought. Hence the virtue and pungency of the influence on the mind of natural objects, whether inorganic or organized. Man imprisoned, man crystallized, man vegetative, speaks to man impersonated. That power which does not respect quantity, which makes the whole and the particle its equal ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson |
