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It is the tragic story of the cultural crusader in a mass society that he cannot win, but that we would be lost without him.more Paul F. Lazarsfeld quotes |
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[M]y work, which I've done for a long time,
was not pursued in order to gain the praise I now enjoy,
but chiefly from a craving after knowledge,
which I notice resides in me more than in most other men.
And therewithal, whenever I found out anything remarkable,
I have thought it my duty to put down my discovery on paper,
so that all ingenious people might be informed thereof.more Antonie van Leeuwenhoek quotes |
The liberty of thinking and publishing whatsoever each one likes, without any hindrances, is not in itself an advantage over which society can wisely rejoice. On the contrary, it is the fountainhead and origin of many evils.more Pope Leo XIII quotes |
Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others.more Doris Lessing quotes |
Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.more Gotthold Ephraim Lessing quotes |
The burning of an author’s books, imprisonment for opinion’s sake, has always been the tribute that an ignorant age pays to the genius of its time.more Joseph Lewis quotes |
Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile. In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize.more Sinclair Lewis quotes |
Collective judgment of new ideas is so often wrong that it is arguable that progress depends on individuals being free to back their own judgment despite collective disapproval.more Sir William Arthur Lewis quotes |
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Tolerance is the positive and cordial effort to understand another's beliefs, practices, and habits without necessarily sharing or accepting them.more Joshua Liebman quotes |
New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.more John Locke quotes |
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And I honor the man
who is willing to sink
Half his present repute
for the freedom to think
And, when he has thought,
be his cause strong or weak
Will risk t’ other half
for the freedom to speak.more James Russell Lowell quotes |
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The dissenter is every human being at those times of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.more Archibald Macleish quotes |
Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered.more Archibald Macleish quotes |
The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, or to publish their sentiments; and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable.more James Madison quotes |
Whilst we assert a freedom to embrace, to profess, and to observe the Religion which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny an equal freedom to choose minds who have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us.more James Madison quotes |
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It is impossible for ideas to compete in the marketplace if no forum for their presentation is provided or available.more Thomas Mann quotes |
If the First Amendment means anything,
it means that a state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house,
what books he may read or what films he may watch.
Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought
of giving government the power to control men's minds.more Justice Thurgood Marshall quotes |
It is the trivial, the irrelevant, the sensational, the appeal to obsolete bigotry which naturally give it greatest publicity. In such publicity it becomes a mere vulgar caricature of itself.more Everett Dean Martin quotes |
The educator aims at a slow process of development; the propagandist, at quick results. The educator tries to tell people how to think; the propagandist, what to think. The educator strives to develop individual responsibility; the propagandist, mass effects. The educator wants thinking; the propagandist, action. The educator fails unless he achieves an open mind; the propagandist, unless he achieves a closed mind.more Everett Dean Martin quotes |
One of the serious results of propaganda is that it has caused the public to think that education and propaganda are the same thing, and thus to make an ignorant multitude believe it is being educated when it is only being manipulated. Education aims at independence of judgement. Propaganda offers ready-made opinions for the unthinking herd.more Everett Dean Martin quotes |
Human freedom involves the capacity to pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight.more Rollo May quotes |
The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.more H. L. Mencken quotes |
The psychologists and the metaphysicians wrangle endlessly over the nature of the thinking process in man, but no matter how violently they differ otherwise they all agree that it has little to do with logic and is not much conditioned by overt facts.more H. L. Mencken quotes |
The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the
prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost invariably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and
intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And if he is not romantic personally, he is apt to spread discontent among those who are.more H. L. Mencken quotes |
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Debate, it seems to me, is one of the most useful of human inventions. It is the mother and father of all free inquiry and honest thought. It tests ideas, detects errors and promotes clear thinking. A man cannot stand up before it without exposing his whole intellectual stock of goods.more H. L. Mencken quotes |
The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to prevailing superstition or taboo.more H. L. Mencken quotes |
The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest form from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a natural philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society.more H. L. Mencken quotes |
No one ever heard of the truth being enforced by law. When the secular is called in to sustain an idea, whether new or old, it is always a bad idea, and not infrequently it is downright idiotic.more H. L. Mencken quotes |
I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.more H. L. Mencken quotes |
The ideal type of the Communist is a man in whom all individual, emotional, and unconscious elements have been reduced to a minimum and subjected to the control of an iron will, informed by a supple intellect. That intellect is totally at the service of a single and compelling idea, made incarnate in the Communist Party: the concept of History as an inexorable god whose ways are revealed ‘scientifically’ through the doctrine and method of Marxism-Leninism.more Frank Straus Meyer quotes |
If all mankind minus one were of one opinion and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that person that he, if he had the power, would be in silencing mankind… If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.more John Stuart Mill quotes |
There is never any fair and thorough discussion of heretical opinions... The greatest harm done is to those who are not heretics, and whose whole mental development is cramped and their reason cowed, by the fear of heresy.more John Stuart Mill quotes |
Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them.more John Stuart Mill quotes |
Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.more John Stuart Mill quotes |
A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body.more John Stuart Mill quotes |
Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind.more Henry Miller quotes |
If the political-correctness fascists get their way, we can safely assume it will be correct-thinking, “political cleansing” squads deciding what we can or cannot say on the Intenet. These people fear public debate and demand homogenization of “acceptable” attitudes compatible with their emotional, utopian idealism.more Charles W. Moore quotes |
A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face... one of the few havens remaining where a man's mind can get both provocation and privacy.more Charles Langbridge Morgan quotes |
Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this.more Toni Morrison quotes |
The artist and the censor differ in this wise: that the first is a decent mind in an indecent body and that the second is an indecent mind in a decent body.more George Jean Nathan quotes |
Toleration of people who differ in convictions and habits requires a residual awareness of the complexity of truth and the possibility of opposing view having some light on one or the other facet of a many-sided truth.more Reinhold Niebuhr quotes |
It is interesting to observe that in the year 1935 the average individual's incurious attitude towards the phenomenon of the State is precisely what his attitude was toward the phenomenon of the Church in the year, say, 1500. ... it does not appear to have occurred to the Church-citizen of that day, any more than it occurs to the State-citizen of the present, to ask what sort of institution it was that claimed his allegiance.more Albert Jay Nock quotes |
