[Tyranny is] to compel men not to think as they do, to compel men to express thoughts that are not their own.more Milovan Djilas quotes |
An unexamined idea, to paraphrase Socrates, is not worth having and a society whose ideas are never explored for possible error may eventually find its foundations insecure.more Mark Van Doren quotes |
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Among the liberties of citizens that are guaranteed are ... the right to believe what one chooses, the right to differ from his neighbor, the right to pick and choose the political philosophy he likes best, the right to associate with whomever he chooses, the right to join groups he prefers ...more William O. Douglas quotes |
The great and invigorating influences in American life have been the unorthodox: the people who challenge an existing institution or way of life, or say and do things that make people think.more William O. Douglas quotes |
The great and invigorating influences in American life have been the unorthodox: the people who challenge an existing institution or way of life, or say and do things that make people think.more William O. Douglas quotes |
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All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.more Albert Einstein quotes |
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Who shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing that there is no practical question on which anything more than an approximate solution can be had?more Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes |
Every man – in the development of his own personality – has the right to form his own beliefs and opinions. Hence, suppression of belief, opinion and expression is an affront to the dignity of man, a negation of man’s essential nature.more Thomas I. Emerson quotes |
The right to freedom of expression is justified first of all as the right of an individual purely in his capacity as an individual. It derives from the widely accepted premise of Western thought that the proper end of man is the realization of his character and potentialities as a human being.more Thomas I. Emerson quotes |
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The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical, to demand the credentials of all statements that claim to be facts.more Bergan Evans quotes |
Censorship is a dangerous tool that is primarily used to suppress from those who would challenge oppression by the society and that state, and particularly victimizes minorities. [It] can never eliminate evil ideas, and so the best answer to bad speech is more speech.more Feminists Against Censorship quotes |
Either you think – or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.more F. Scott Fitzgerald quotes |
We must not overlook the role that extremists play. They are the gadflies that keep society from being too complacent.more Abraham Flexner quotes |
Every attempt to gag the free expression of thought is an unsocial act against society. That is why judges and juries who try to enforce such laws make themselves ridiculous.more Jay Fox quotes |
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The last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.more Viktor Frankl quotes |
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms – to chose one’s attitudes in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.more Viktor Frankl quotes |
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.more Robert Frost quotes |
English character and English freedom depend comparatively little on
the form which the Constitution assumes at Westminster. A centralised
democracy may be as tyrannical as an absolute monarch; and if the vigour
of the nation is to continue unimpaired, each individual, each family,
each district, must preserve as far as possible its independence, its
self-completeness, its powers and its privilege to manage its own
affairs and think its own thoughts.more James Anthony Froude quotes |
I know of no inquiry which the impulses of man suggests that is forbidden to the resolution of man to pursue.more Margaret Fuller quotes |
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These are the days when men of all social disciplines and all political faiths seek the comfortable and the accepted; when the man of controversy is looked upon as a disturbing influence; when originality is taken to be a mark of instability; and when, in minor modification of the original parable, the bland lead the bland.more John Kenneth Galbraith quotes |
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The most fatal blow to progress is slavery of the intellect. The most sacred right of humanity is the right to think, and next to the right to think is the right to express that thought without fear.more Helen H. Gardner quotes |
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Some who are too scrupulous to steal your possessions nevertheless see no wrong in tampering with your thoughts.more Kahlil Gibran quotes |
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Humanity's most valuable assets have been the non-conformists. Were it not for the non-conformists, he who refuses to be satisfied to go along with the continuance of things as they are, and insists upon attempting to find new ways of bettering things, the world would have known little progress, indeed.more Josiah William Gitt quotes |
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Whenever government assumes to deliver us from the trouble of thinking for ourselves, the only consequences it produces are those of torpor and imbecility.more William Godwin quotes |
Lose this day loitering
'Twill be the same old story,
Tomorrow and the next,
Even more dilatory.
Whatever you would do,
Or dream of doing, begin it!
Boldness has power, genius, and magic in it.
Begin it now.more Johann Wolfgang von Goethe quotes |
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To subject an artist’s work to a litmus test of political probity – and to punish institutions that will not carry out the mandate of the state – is to traffic in the thought control that gave us Stalinism and Nazism…more Richard Goldstein quotes |
Freedom of conscience is a natural right, both antecedent and superior to all human laws and institutions whatever; a right which laws never gave and a right which laws can never take away.more John Goodwin quotes |
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If what is best in mankind, and what its progress depends on, manifests itself primarily in the individual and only secondarily in the mass, then our objectives should be to maintain such freedom as allows the individual to think and speak for himself.more Louis J. Halle quotes |
In a free government, the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, and in the other in the multiplicity of sects.more Alexander Hamilton quotes |
The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women...more Judge Learned Hand quotes |
Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening. The average American [should be] content with their humble role in life, because they're not tempted to think about any other role.more William T. Harris quotes |
A society committed to the search for truth must give protection to, and set a high value upon, the independent and original mind, however angular, however rasping, however, socially unpleasant it may be; for it is upon such minds in large measure, that the effective search for truth depends.more Caryl Parker Haskins quotes |
A society that does not recognize that each individual has values of his own which he is entitled to follow can have no respect for the dignity of the individual and cannot really know freedom.more Fredrich August von Hayek quotes |
Even more significant of the inherent weakness of the collectivist theories is the extraordinary paradox that from the assertion that society is in some sense more than merely the aggregate of all individuals their adherents regularly pass by a sort of intellectual somersault to the thesis that in order that the coherence of this larger entity be safeguarded it must be subjected to conscious control, that is, to the control of what in the last resort must be an individual mind. It thus comes about that in practice it is regularly the theoretical collectivist who extols individual reason and demands that all forces of society be made subject to the direction of a single mastermind, while it is the individualist who recognizes the limitations of the powers of individual reason and consequently advocates freedom as a means for the fullest development of the powers of the interindividual process.more Fredrich August von Hayek quotes |
