Henry Steele Commager Quotes

The case against censoring anything is absolute: ... nothing that could be censored can be so bad in its effects, in the long run, as censorship itself.

Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even specially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities.

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.

Dissent is the native activity of the scientist, and it has got him into a good deal of trouble in the last years. But if that is cut off, what is left will not be a scientist. And I doubt whether it will be a man.

When schools produce students who learned to think on the left or on the right, they're not thinking for themselves.

The supreme lesson of any education should be to think for yourself and to be yourself; absent this attainment, education creates dangerous, stupefying conformity.

Action and faith enslave thought, both of them in order not be troubled or inconvenienced by reflection, criticism, and doubt.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.

He who dares not reason, is a slave.

Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.

People must not think that all bad in man which is unleashed, the moment you impose censorship disappears from man.

Once you “volunteer” and engage in self-censorship something happens to your conscience.

As to the evil which results from censorship, it is impossible to measure it, because it is impossible to tell where it ends.

When people talk of the freedom of writing, speaking, or thinking, I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists; but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more.

Everywhere you look, there's someone doing your thinking for you and telling you what to think and when to think of it.

Let the human mind loose. It must be loose. It will be loose. Superstition and dogmatism cannot confine it.

Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking.

Censorship that comes from the outside assumes about people an inability to make reasoned choices.

To destroy guide-boards that point in the wrong direction . . . to drive the fiend of fear from the mind . . . is the task of the Freethinker.

My thinking is very flexible, and I hope that it will remain flexible and creative as long as biology permits me to think and that I will remain a rebel all my life.

Freedom of mind is the proof of one's existence.

The human mind is not meant to be governed, certainly not by any book of rules yet written; it is supposed to run itself, and we are obliged to follow it along, trying to keep up with it as best we can.

We have got to defeat this attack on the freedom of the mind...But it takes courage for a young man with a family to stand up to it; all the more obligation on those of us who have nothing left to lose. At any age it is better to be a dead lion than a living dog - though better still, of course, to be a living and victorious lion - but it is easier to run the risk of being killed (or fired) in action if before long you are going to be dead anyway. This freedom seems to me the chief consolation of old age.

Our civilisation cannot afford to let the censor-moron loose. The censor-moron does not really hate anything but the living and growing human consciousness.

Men talk of freedom! How many are free to think? Free from fear, from perturbation, from prejudice? Nine hundred and ninety-nine in a thousand are perfect slaves.