"Free thought" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... esteemed among the most important literary productions of modern times. Others, again, Mr. George Saintsbury for example, consider it an absurdly overrated book. For our own part, we are inclined to give it conspicuous place in the history of free thought in France. La Boetie died young; and his "Contr' Un" was published posthumously,—first by the Protestants, after the terrible day of St. Bartholomew. Our readers may judge for themselves whether a pamphlet in which such passages as the following could occur, must not have had an historic ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... such a place in the family and social circle, as she never held before; and from common schools, and normal schools, and high schools, and theological seminaries, and even colleges, all independent of the hierarchy, and beyond the power of the Jesuits; with the logic of free thought, ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume II. • Rufus Anderson
... primed with such historic instances out of books and pamphlets spread broadcast by the contemporary apostles of 'free thought.' Of history proper he of course knew nothing, but these splinters of quasi-historic evidence had run deep into his flesh. Despise him, if you like, but try to understand him. It was his very humaneness which brought him to this pass; recitals of old savagery had poisoned his blood, and the ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... is necessary that the speaker should secure the sympathies of his audience, should convince them of his statesmanship, should show that he is free from any taint of self-interest or dissimulation. These conditions of public trust still form, as heretofore, in every country of free thought and free speech, the foundation of a good reputation and of personal influence. It is with the fact that such are the characteristics of my friend's eloquence, that I have been strongly impressed in collecting and editing the ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... naturally, for we had been debating all kinds of possibilities as to the future; and he had been inveighing, in his own tumultuous manner, against the new and sacrilegious ideas that are just now being preached by the modern apostles of free thought in novel and journal. We agreed in thinking that the Christian ideal of marriage was nowhere so happily realized as in Ireland, where, at least up to recent times, there was no lurid and volcanic company-keeping before marriage, and no bitter ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... penalty of social ostracism or public contumely upon all who reject the popular religion is to erect an arbitrary barrier against intellectual and spiritual advance, and to put a protective tariff upon orthodoxy to the disadvantage of science and free thought. ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... resignation and the gift of a millon dollars for building a vast Temple of Humanity, that would be a forum of free thought in the heart of the metropolis, were the subject of separate editorials in ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... little 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.)
... and where there is no free thought there is no intellectual life. The priests take their ideas from Rome cut and dried like tobacco and the people take their ideas from the priests cut and dried like tobacco. Ireland is a terrifying example of what becomes of a country when it accepts prejudices ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... of Prussia forbade Kant to speak concerning religion. The Prussia of Frederick William III. and of Frederick William IV. was almost as reactionary as if Metternich had ruled in Berlin as well as in Vienna. The history of the censorship of the press and of the repression of free thought in Germany until the year 1848 is a sad chapter. The ruling influences in the Lutheran Church in that era, practically throughout Germany, were reactionary. The universities did indeed in large measure retain their ancient freedom. ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... the formula with which we are familiar:— "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." ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... fly the boundary of the Senses—live the Ideal life free Thought can give; And, lo, the gulf shall vanish, and the chill Of the soul's impotent despair be gone! And with divinity thou sharest the throne, Let but divinity become thy will! Scorn not the Law—permit its iron band The sense (it ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... when his mother's great-grandmother was strangled on Witch Hill, with a text from the Old Testament for her halter. With all this, he has a boundless belief in the future of this experimental hemisphere, and especially in the destiny of the free thought ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... 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 that the instinct of reformation ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... remembered that the most purely practical science does take this view of mental evil; it does not seek to argue with it like a heresy but simply to snap it like a spell. Neither modern science nor ancient religion believes in complete free thought. Theology rebukes certain thoughts by calling them blasphemous. Science rebukes certain thoughts by calling them morbid. For example, some religious societies discouraged men more or less from thinking about sex. The new scientific society definitely discourages men from ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... feebler has civilization strengthened, and progress has been made more and more rapidly as 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, ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... bigot; he had a genuine respect for learned men; he preferred winning them by gracious words and preferment to coercing them with the pillory and the shears. But had Laud's system prevailed, there would soon have been an end of the philosophy of Great Tew. Mr. Arnold points to the free thought of Bacon. Nobody in those days scented mischief in the inductive philosophy, while in politics and religion Bacon was scrupulously orthodox. Cromwell's faith was a narrower and coarser thing by far than that of the inmates ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... light on us and on thine own, O soul whose spirit on earth was as a rod To scourge off priests, a sword to pierce their God, A staff for man's free thought to walk alone, A lamp to lead him far from shrine and throne On ways untrodden where his fathers trod Ere earth's heart withered at a high priest's nod And all men's mouths that made not prayer made moan. From bonds and torments and the ravening flame Surely thy spirit of sense ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... unanimity of opinion in England in regard to the religious interpretation of the world than that which prevailed at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The excesses on the Continent which had accompanied the advocacy of free thought had disposed men's mind to fall back upon authority, and most of all in matters that affected the basis on which the continuance of social order and moral conduct depended. The general position was clearly apprehended, and was accepted as if beyond dispute. Men spoke and thought of the Order of ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... Rome at its own door. The Vatican rained anathemas. It might as well have tried to blow out the stars; and all the fires of the furious popes who followed Leo were not sharp enough to consume the colossal heresy of free thought. But king and emperor and pope fed the fire. The reign of terror blasted the Netherlands, and when it had succeeded there, when Italy, Austria, and Holland surrounded the states of Germany, Philip knew it would be the smothering coil of the serpent around the cradle of religious ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... 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
... man believes the bible to be infallible, that is his master. The civilization of this century is not the child of faith, but of unbelief—the result of free thought. ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... strengthen the forces of conservatism, and thus to block the path of the social and political reformer. Its effect on the Brethren was similar. As the news of its horrors spread through Europe, good Christian people could not help feeling that all free thought led straight to atheism, and all change to revolution and murder; and, therefore, the leading Brethren in Germany opposed liberty because they were afraid of license, and reform because they ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... 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 ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot
... his field, the world: they therefore believed themselves bound to do for him what he neglected, or at least did not see fit, to do for himself; and they tried to root up the tares from among the wheat. They have tried to repress free thought, and to silence novel opinions, forgetful that Christ must have been right after all, and that in silencing opinions which startled them, they might be quenching the Spirit, and despising prophecies. But they found it ...
— Discipline and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... feel a certain sense of responsibility for the young man. He would endeavour to influence him; he would implore him to play games, to go to lectures, to attend early chapel. He would do his best to check any symptom of originality or free thought. He would try to make him dutiful and orthodox, and to discourage all his ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... has a word to utter, will be allowed by all candid judges, whatever criticism they may pass upon the effectiveness of his own argument. There is abundant evidence in this book of his large intimacy with the freshest forms of speculation, as developed by the free thought of our age. While he identifies these speculations with the recent writers who have adopted them, he is not to be understood as allowing that these writers have originated any novel speculations, or excelled the sceptics of former times in acuteness, or plausibility, or success ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... was all the easier because he knew nothing of German literature; and, indeed, the word 'German' was a term of reproach signifying something very awful, although nobody knew exactly what it was." The obscurantist and opponent of free thought has shown signs of hope that the German's reputation for awfulness may turn us from his evil companionship into the restful paths of British piety. The Englishman (especially, I believe, the Saxon element) has too often been prone to make a stronghold of ignorance. This stronghold has ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... be heard?" and, besides this, Mr. Haeckel has set aside intuitive, or first truths, and, as all axiomatic truths are of this class, perhaps it is wrong for us to bother you with our logic? Nevertheless we can't refrain from speaking our piece; we are advocates of free thought ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 9. September, 1880 • Various
... in the National Convention, and took his seat in that radical assembly in 1792." At this time Col. Ingersoll's church had everything its own way in France. There was no God to respect or devil to fear. "Free thought" ruled—its reign was a reign of night. The goddess of reason was the "twin sister of the Spanish Inquisition." The soldiers were in power, and great hearts were made to bleed. Three hundred and sixty-six men in the National Convention voted for the death of the king. Three hundred ...
— The Christian Foundation, May, 1880
... valleys will no longer resound with the din of labor, or be blackened by the smoke of the factory, would surely be out of place. What we might regret is that Britain, which we know and are proud of, the Britain of great achievements in politics and literature, of free thought and self-respecting obedience, of a thousand years of high endeavor and constant progress, was indeed to perish when these factories and furnaces whirled and blazed their last. But, it is not so. This country's fortunes are gradually being merged into ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 447, July 26, 1884 • Various
... this, you see; the classical education makes you imitate all the time ... Greek Prose like Sophocles ... Latin Verse like Petronius.... I don't know if I have got the names right ... probably not ... never could stick doing it. There is no free thought. Classics men do very well in the Foreign Offices, but they can't think.... What do classics do in the literary world? Nothing. Bennett, Lloyd George, Wells—the best men never went to a Public School.... We want originality; and the classics don't give it. ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... contemporaries of his creator would have phrased it, was certainly never begotten by orthodoxy on horror than the figure of the portentous and prodigious criminal who here represents the practical results of indulgence in free thought. It is a fine proof of the author's naturally dramatic genius that this terrific successor of Vanini and precursor of Diderot should be other than a mere man of straw. Huge as is the wilful and deliberate exaggeration of his atrocity, ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... from the roots and the buds of a universal Reason, contained in every person not degenerate or divorced from nature desnature. A mass of passages in the Essays strengthen the opinion that Montaigne was an upright, noble-minded Humanist, a disciple of free thought, who wished to fathom human nature, and was anxious to help in delivering mankind from the fetters of manifold superstitions. Read his Essay on Education; and the conviction will force itself upon you that in many things he was far in advance ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... vigorous as ever. Friends! I am finding fault with the Puritans in the very midst of their descendants. But what greater compliment could I pay these old Puritans than this? for their greatest glory is, that they left to their descendants the precious legacy of free thought! and so deeply imbedded is this in the very bones of the race, that they will gladly hear a stranger criticize and even condemn, a portion of the Puritan mind: knowing full well, that the fabric which they builded ...
— A Lecture on Physical Development, and its Relations to Mental and Spiritual Development, delivered before the American Institute of Instruction, at their Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting, in Norwich, Conn • S.R. Calthrop
... and the exceptional ability which directs it. This is the case of books, or of other printed publications. Many years ago the English radical Charles Bradlaugh urged in a debate with a then prominent socialist that under socialism no literary expression of free thought would be practicable, and I cannot do more than accentuate his lucid and unanswerable arguments. The state, being controller of all the implements of production, a private press would be as illegal as the dies used by a forger. Nobody could issue ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... Bishop of St. Davids, and Sherlock, whose book was translated into French. A Life of Woolston has been written anonymously by some one who somewhat favoured his views and supported his tenets. He may certainly be classed among the leaders of Free Thought ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... said, commencing his remarks a Latin quotation,) "tranquilitati probrosoe anteponenda est, and in the lively observations we have heard, I mark not the signs of dissension, but of free thought, having in view the honor of God and the welfare of his little flock scattered abroad in a strange land. But the good shepherd will yet gather the dispersed into his arms, and gently lead them through green pastures and by still waters. Our Israel owes you thanks, brethren, ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... Rev. John Bampton. Preface. Analysis of the lectures. Lecture I. On The Subject, Method, And Purpose Of The Course Of Lectures. Lecture II. The Literary Opposition of Heathens Against Christianity in the Early Ages. Lecture III. Free Thought During The Middle Ages, and At The Renaissance; Together With Its Rise in Modern Times. Lecture IV. Deism in England Previous to A.D. 1760. Lecture V. Infidelity in France in the Eighteenth Century, and Unbelief in England Subsequent ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... may last of it," suggested Chandos, while his hand wandered among the blue bells of the curling hyacinths. "Because few save scholars read the 'Defensio Populi' now, the work it did for free thought cannot die. None the less does the cathedral enrich Cologne because the name of the man who begot its beauty has passed unrecorded. None the less is the world aided by the effort of every true and daring ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... quiet him. He was a man not of free thought only, but of free speech, and knew no concealment. Milder men in those times, as later Melancthon and Erasmus, were full of admiration of Hutten, and valued his skill and force. But they were afraid of him, and fearful always ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... America became the Pope's favorite parish. For the benefit of any, native or colonist, who thought that a purer religion should be, at any rate, permitted, the Inquisition was established at Lima, and later on at Cartagena, where, Colombian history informs us, 400,000 were condemned to death. Free thought was soon stamped out when death ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... When people begin to reason, a shadow has already fallen across faith, though the reasoners might have shrunk with horror from knowledge of the goal of their work, and though centuries may elapse before the shadow deepens into eclipse. But the church was strong and alert in the times when free thought vainly tried to rear a dangerous head in Italy. With the Protestant revolution came slowly a wider freedom, while the prolonged and tempestuous discussion between the old church and the reformed bodies, as well as the manifold variations among ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... fire suddenly 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 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... because they are comfortable, and lead to wealth, enjoyment, reputation,—this, whether a true account or not of the theologian to whom we have referred. . .is yet to be found under many eloquent defences of the faith, many fervent and scornful denunciations of criticism and free thought. . . . In 'Calaban upon Setebos', if it is more than the product of Mr. Browning's fondness for all abnormal forms of spiritual life, speculating among other things on the religious thoughts of a half brute-like savage, ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... you must read into all those bald sentences and empty 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
... Rowan and other portions of the State, lying in the track of the southern tide of emigration from more northern colonies, were principally settled by the Scotch-Irish, who, inheriting an independence of character and free thought from their earliest training, soon became the controlling element of society, and directed its leading religious and political movements. They were not only the friends of a liberal education, but the early and unflinching advocates of civil and religious ...
— Sketches of Western North Carolina, Historical and Biographical • C. L. Hunter |
