David R. Brower Quotes

Every individual in the church is free to think as he pleases.

It is the rare fortune of these days that one may think what one likes and say what one thinks

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

No mind should submit their mind to another mind He that complies against his will is of his own opinion still -- that's my motto. I won't be brainwashed.

This I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected.

Intellectual liberty is the air of the soul, the sunshine of the mind, and without it, the world is a prison, the universe is a dungeon.

New ideas are not born in a conforming environment.

To my mind the single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom.

And it’s only by going nowhere - by sitting still or letting my mind relax - that I find that the thoughts that come to me unbidden are far fresher and more imaginative than the ones I consciously seek out.

Scientists' minds may jump around like amorous toads, but they do seem to accept such behavior in one another.

I'm always working on something. I wish I had more time for free-thinking and brainstorming new ideas. That's not to say my mind doesn't wander, but I find myself wishing for more of that kind of time.

What we think about when we are free to think about what we will – that is what we are or will soon become.

You may chain my hands, you may shackle my feet; you may even throw me into a dark prison; but you shall not enslave my thinking, because it is free!

It is pleasant to have been to a place the way a river went.

Is he a dread genetic determinist, or a dread environmental determinist? He is neither, of course, for both these species of bogeyman are as mythical as werewolves. By increasing the information we have about the various causes of the constraints that limit our current opportunities, he has increased our powers to avoid what we want to avoid, prevent what we want to prevent. Knowledge of the roles of our genes, and the genes of the other species around us, is not the enemy of human freedom, but one of its best friends.

sooner or later, if the activity of the mind is restricted anywhere it will cease to function even where it is allowed to be free.

Think! You can think any think that you wish.

The movement of the stream is distinct from the river bed, although it must adopt its winding course.

I enter into discussion and argument with great freedom and ease, inasmuch as opinion finds me in a bad soil to penetrate and take deep root in. No propositions astonish me, no belief offends me, whatever contrast it offers to my own. There is no fancy so frivolous and so extravagant that it does not seem to me quite suitable to the production of the human mind.

As free human beings we can use our unique intelligence to try to understand ourselves and our world. But if we are prevented from using our creative potential, we are deprived of one of the basic characteristics of a human being.

In the 19th century, we devoted our best minds to exploring nature. In the 20th century, we devoted ourselves to controlling and harnessing it. In the 21st century, we must devote ourselves to restoring it.

I don't want to tell people what they should think.

...The peculiar air of Oxford-the air of liberty to care for the things of the mind assured and secured by machinery which is in itself a satisfaction to sense.

In spite of Death, the mark and seal of the parental control, Man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticise, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is acquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life.