Whosoever wishes to know about the world
must learn about it in its particular details.
Knowledge is not intelligence.
In searching for the truth be ready for the unexpected.
Change alone is unchanging.
The same road goes both up and down.
The beginning of a circle is also its end.
Not I, but the world says it: all is one.
And yet everything comes in season.more Heraclitus quotes |
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Any attempt to replace a personal conscience by a collective conscience does violence to the individual and is the first step toward totalitarianism.more Herman Hesse quotes |
What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow; that is the whole Law: all the rest is interpretation.more Hillel quotes |
To some, freedom means the opportunity to do what they want to do; to most it means not to do what they do not want to do. It is perhaps true that those who can grow will feel free under any condition.more Eric Hoffer quotes |
It is doubtful if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power -- power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors; they want to retaliate.more Eric Hoffer quotes |
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It [freedom] is a thing of the spirit. Men must be free to worship, to think, to hold opinions, to speak without fear. They must be free to challenge wrong and oppression with the surety of justice.more Herbert Hoover quotes |
Freedom conceives that the mind and spirit of man can be free only if he is free to pattern his own life, to develop his own talents, free to earn, to spend, to save, to acquire property as the security of his old age and his family.more Herbert Hoover quotes |
Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.more Victor Hugo quotes |
A civilization in which there is not a continuous controversy about important issues…is on the way to totalitarianism and death.more Robert M. Hutchins quotes |
The end cannot justify the means for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.more Aldous Huxley quotes |
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Mental slavery is mental death, and every man who has given up his intellectual freedom is the living coffin of his dead soul.more Robert G. Ingersoll quotes |
The real searcher after truth will not receive the old because it is old, or reject the new because it is new. He will not believe men because they are dead, or contradict them because they are alive. With him an utterance is worth the truth, the reason it contains, without the slightest regard to the author. He may have been a king or serf -- a philosopher or servant, -- but the utterance neither gains nor loses in truth or reason. Its value is absolutely independent of the fame or station of the man who gave it to the world.more Robert G. Ingersoll quotes |
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If there is a God who will damn his children forever, I would rather go to hell than to go to heaven and keep the society of such an infamous tyrant. I make my choice now. I despise that doctrine. It has covered the cheeks of this world with tears. It has polluted the hearts of children, and poisoned the imaginations of men. It has been a constant pain, a perpetual terror to every good man and woman and child. It has filled the good with horror and with fear; but it has had no effect upon the infamous and base. It has wrung the hearts of the tender, it has furrowed the cheeks of the good. This doctrine never should be preached again. What right have you, sir, Mr. clergyman, you, minister of the gospel to stand at the portals of the tomb, at the vestibule of eternity, and fill the future with horror and with fear? I do not believe this doctrine, neither do you. If you did, you could not sleep one moment. Any man who believes it, and has within his breast a decent, throbbing heart, will go insane. A man who believes that doctrine and does not go insane has the heart of a snake and the conscience of a hyena.more Robert G. Ingersoll quotes |
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Our forefathers found the evils of free thinking more to be endured than the evils of inquest or suppression. This is because thoughtful, bold and independent minds are essential to the wise and considered self-government.more Justice Robert H. Jackson quotes |
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Today, not a numerous, but an active part of the German people are beginning to realize, not that they have been led astray, not that bad times await them, not that the war may end in defeat, but that what is happening is sin and that they are personally responsible for each terrible deed that has been committed -- naturally, not in the earthly sense, but as Christians.more Helmuth James quotes |
Since National Socialism came to power, I have striven to make its consequences milder for its victims and to prepare the way for a change. In that, my conscience drove me -- and in the end, that is a man's duty.more Helmuth James quotes |
An elective despotism was not the government we fought for, but one which should not only be founded on true free principles, but in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among general bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually checked and restrained by the others.more Thomas Jefferson quotes |
It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others.more Thomas Jefferson quotes |
Our particular principles of religion are a subject of accountability to our god alone. I enquire after no man's and trouble none with mine; nor is it given to us in this life to know whether yours or mine, our friend's or our foe's, are exactly the right.more Thomas Jefferson quotes |
The error seems not sufficiently eradicated, that the operations of the mind, as well as the acts of the body, are subject to the coercion of the laws. But our rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. ... Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now. Thus in France the emetic was once forbidden as a medicine, and the potatoe as an article of food.more Thomas Jefferson quotes |
I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.more Thomas Jefferson quotes |
Reason and free inquiry are the only effective agents against error. Give a loose to them, they will support the true religion by bringing every false one to their tribunal, to the test of their investigation. They are the natural enemies of error and error only. Had not the Roman government permitted free inquiry, Christianity could never have been introduced. Had not free inquiry been indulged at the era of the Reformation, the corruption of Christianity could not have been purged away.more Thomas Jefferson quotes |
To preserve the freedom
of the human mind then
and freedom of the press,
every spirit should be ready
to devote itself to martyrdom.more Thomas Jefferson quotes |
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In questions of law or of fact conscience is very often confounded with opinion. No man’s conscience can tell him the rights of another man; they must be known by rational investigation or historical inquiry.more Dr. Samuel Johnson quotes |
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Count it the greatest sin to prefer life to honor, and for the sake of living to lose what makes life worth having.more Juvenal quotes |
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You taught me to be nice, so nice that now I am so full of niceness, I have no sense of right and wrong, no outrage, no passion.more Garrison Keillor quotes |
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Activate yourself to duty by remembering your position, who you are, and what you have obliged yourself to be.more Thomas Kempis quotes |
The truth is sometimes a poor competitor in the market place of ideas -- complicated, unsatisfying, full of dilemmas, always vulnerable to misinterpretation and abuse.more George F. Kennan quotes |
A man does what he must -- in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers -- and this is the basis of all human morality.more John F. Kennedy quotes |
The wave of the future is not the conquest of the world by a single dogmatic creed but the liberation of the diverse energies of free nations and free men.more John F. Kennedy quotes |
The problem of power is how to achieve its responsible use rather than its irresponsible and indulgent use -- of how to get men of power to live for the public rather than off the public.more Robert F. Kennedy quotes |
Character is the accumulated confidence that individual men and women acquire from years of doing the right thing, over and over again, even when they don't feel like it. People with character understand that their lives are filled with events and choices that are significant, above all, not because of the short term success or failure of the search for money or position, but because the choices we make are actually making us into one kind of person, or another. Our life of choices is a life-long labor to make ourselves into a person who has begun to respond adequately to the awesome gift we received from God when He made us in His image.more Alan Keyes quotes |
The act of voting is one opportunity for us to remember that our whole way of life is predicated on the capacity of ordinary people to judge carefully and well.more Alan Keyes quotes |
Express everything you like. No word can hurt you. None. No idea can hurt you. Not being able to express an idea or word will hurt you more. Like a bullet.more Jamaica Kincaid quotes |
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Cowardice asks the question, is it safe?
Expediency asks the question, is it politic?
Vanity asks the question, is it popular?
But conscience asks the question, is it right?
And there comes a time when one must take a position
that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular,
but one must take it because it is right.more Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. quotes |
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