"Freethinker" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Matveyevitch Zakrasin, who sympathized with the Cadets, gave lessons in Trirodov's school. He was considered a great freethinker among his colleagues, the priests. The town clergy looked askance at him. And the Diocesan Bishop was not ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... at Mildenhall was celebrated for the quality of its grapes, and Sir Thomas used to send every year hampers filled with these grapes, and carried on men's shoulders, to London for the Queen. That stubborn Radical and Freethinker, Tom Paine, was born at Thetford. Sir John Suckling, a Suffolk poet, has written, at any rate, one ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... from their writings. Not that Bishop Berkeley ever wrote with conscious unfairness. The truly Christian, if somewhat eccentric character of the man forbids such a supposition for one moment. His error, no doubt, arose from the vagueness with which the terms Deist, Freethinker, Naturalist, Atheist, were used indiscriminately to stigmatise men of very different views. There was, for example, little or nothing in common between such men as Lord Shaftesbury and Mandeville. The atrocious sentiment ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... and the purity of his morals gave a peculiar weight to his opinions on questions in which the interests of Christianity were concerned. Of all the ministers of the new Sovereigns, he had the largest share of the confidence of the clergy. Shrewsbury was certainly a Whig, and probably a freethinker: he had lost one religion; and it did not very clearly appear that he had found another. Halifax had been during many years accused of scepticism, deism, atheism. Danby's attachment to episcopacy and the liturgy was rather political ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... abated). Be reasonable! Can't you stand hearing the voice of truth for once? I don't in the least expect you to agree with me all at once; but I must say I did expect Mr. Hovstad to admit I was right, when he had recovered his composure a little. He claims to be a freethinker— ...
— An Enemy of the People • Henrik Ibsen
... doubt. The book placed Mill upon the very pinnacle of fame. John Morley declared him "England's foremost thinker," a title to which Gladstone added the weight of his endorsement, a thing we would hardly expect from an ardent churchman, since Mill was always an avowed freethinker, and once declared in Gladstone's presence, "I am one of the few men in England who have not abandoned their religious beliefs, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... intervals. He would go round among the patients questioning them as to their religious feeling and behavior in true class-meeting style. Dr. Shurtleff one day overheard a colloquy between him and Dr. Rogers, a freethinker and reformer, whose vagaries had culminated in his shaving close one side of his immense whiskers, leaving the other side in all its flowing amplitude. Poor fellow! Pitiable as was his case, he made a ludicrous ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... period of his life Jenkin was a Freethinker, holding, as Mr. Stevenson says, all dogmas as 'mere blind struggles to express the inexpressible.' Nevertheless, as time went on he came back to a belief in Christianity. 'The longer I live,' he wrote, 'the more convinced I become of a direct care by God—which is reasonably impossible—but there ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... character would turn out a failure. This was the reason why he no longer encouraged the idea of a marriage between his daughter and his apprentice, a scheme which, somewhat earlier, had been freely discussed. It had seemed an admirable arrangement. The young man promised to turn out a freethinker after Marzio's own heart, and showed a talent for his profession which left nothing to be desired. Some one must be ready to take Marzio's place in the direction of the establishment, and no one could be better fitted to undertake the task than Gianbattista. Lucia would inherit ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... Thou, de, French historian. Thou, Frederick Augustus de, son of above. Toland, John, freethinker. Tutchin, John, editor of Observator, persecuted by Jeffreys. Tyndale, William, ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... But he was recommended to me by my old friend, Madame d'Oilly, as a freethinker, and at the same time by my aunt, Madame de la ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... making himself agreeable to sensible men. I exclude from the class of men to be esteemed agreeable those who would disgust all but fools or blackguards. I exclude parsons who express heretical views in theology in the presence of a patron known to be a freethinker. I exclude men who do great folk's dirty work. I exclude all toad-eaters, sneaks, flatterers, and fawning impostors,—from the school-boy who thinks to gain his master's favor by voluntarily bearing tales of his companions, up to the bishop who declared ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... ridicule a polite freethinker may affect to treat religion himself, he will think it necessary his wife should entertain different notions of it. He may pretend to despise it as a matter of opinion, depending on creeds and systems; but, if he is a man of sense, he will know the ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... to our taste nowadays. This is ALSO an advance, as it was an advance in our fathers that religion as an attitude finally became opposed to their taste, including the enmity and Voltairean bitterness against religion (and all that formerly belonged to freethinker-pantomime). It is the music in our conscience, the dance in our spirit, to which Puritan litanies, moral sermons, ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Bradlaugh caused dissension and division, more real perhaps than apparent, for not all Bradlaugh's supporters had the courage to avow themselves such. It was not easy, at any rate it was not easy in the Five Towns, for a timid man in reply to the question, "Are you in favour of a professed Freethinker sitting in the House of Commons?" to reply, "Yes, I am." There was something shameless in that word 'professed.' If the Freethinker had been ashamed of his freethinking, if he had sought to conceal it in phrases,—the implication was that the case might not have been so bad. This was what ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... you are through, Mr. Freethinker, I will now continue. But I must consider myself your opponent as well as Mr. Liberal's. In the first place, I must admit that you are thoroughly consistent with yourself as far as you go. But, my dear fellow, ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... founded his history on matter of fact. Endymion, we all know, was a king of Elis, though some call him a shepherd. Shepherd or king, however, he was so handsome, that the moon, who saw him sleeping on Mount Latmos, fell in love with him. This no orthodox heathen ever doubted: Lucian, who was a freethinker, laughs indeed at the tale; but has made him ample amends in this history by creating him emperor of ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... left out of account all doctrines of orthodox theology. But if he had been orthodox of the orthodox, his argument obviously could have been directed only to the form of doubt it sought to overcome. And when his closing hymn was condemned as the freethinker's hymn, its censurers surely forgot that their arguments against it would equally apply to the Lord's Prayer, of which it is, ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... kingcraft, and his Zaire (1732), a Parisian Othello, both based on Shakespeare. From this time onward he plunges into a supple and dexterous, if sometimes rather disingenuous, strife with a superior power. Throughout, the poet and man of taste struggles against the philosophic freethinker: he loves the surface impressions, perhaps the reflective illusions; "his sentiments are worth more than his ideas." The English Letters of 1735, written some years before, and now issued with much hesitation, created ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... as blackberries. I just go out and cry, "MALISE, unsuccessful author, too honest journalist, freethinker, co-respondent, bankrupt," ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... been accused of pietism, particularly in Germany, by men who could not distinguish between pietism and piety, just as in England he was attacked as a freethinker by men who never knew the freedom of the children of God. "Christianity is ours, not theirs," he would frequently say of those who made religion a mere profession, and imagined they knew Christ because they held ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... French language. In the kitchen he went by the nickname of the "English Bear." Strange to say, he was a great favorite with my master and my mistress. They even humored certain superstitious terrors to which this repulsive person was subject—terrors into the nature of which I, as an advanced freethinker, never thought it ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... priests turn soldiers it is time for soldiers to turn tinkers and mend holes in pots, instead of making holes in our enemies," replied his companion, a fashionable freethinker of ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... the growth of Christianity, to examine its morality and its dogmas, to study the history of its supposed founder, to trace out its symbols and its ceremonies; in fine, to show cause for its utter rejection by the Freethinker. The foundation stone of Christianity, laid in Paradise by the Creation and Fall of Man 6,000 years ago, has already been destroyed in the first section of this work; and we may at once, therefore, proceed to Christianity itself. The history of the ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... Leben Jesu, 1846. In 1851 she went to London and became one of the editors of the Radical organ, the Westminster Review. Here she formed a connection—a marriage in all but the name—with George Henry Lewes, who was, like {278} herself, a freethinker, and who published, among other things, a Biographical History of Philosophy. Lewes had also written fiction, and it was at his suggestion that his wife undertook story writing. Her Scenes of Clerical Life ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... surmises prevailed, especially in the latter part of his life, as to the means by which he possessed himself of the estates he then held in right of his lady, and those too that he enjoyed through the attainder of her uncle, Sir James Harrington. He acknowledged himself a freethinker and a materialist, a character of rare occurrence in those ages, showing him to be as daring in his opinions as in his pursuits. That the soul of man was like the winding up of a watch, and that when the spring was run down the man died, and the soul was extinct, are still recorded ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... maturity and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; a Christian or a freethinker; I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer; until, at last, I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations, except the last. The one ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley |
