Albert Szent-Gyorgyi Quotes

A university's essential character is that of being a center of free inquiry and criticism - a thing not to be sacrificed for anything else.

Academic freedom is being lost by a great many people who dare to challenge Darwinism. That's a terrifying situation. That's contrary to the principles of science.

I strongly believe that fundamental science cannot be driven by instructional, industrial, governmental or military pressures. This was the reason why I decided, as far as possible, not to accept money from the government.

Great research universities must insist on independence from government and on the exercise of academic freedom.

I prize the conditions under which I have lived because they have permitted me to choose my opportunities, to inquire into such matters as interested me, and to publish what I believed to be true, uncontrolled by any central authority.

I floated around in the department of biochemistry and learned some interesting things, and then I began to... I never wanted to work with a mentor because I always wanted to have my own reputation and be free to do what I wanted to do. So I worked with the weakest people in the department. Don't make that public.

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

Science is a self-sufficient activity.

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.

For science must breathe the oxygen of freedom.

Every man must have the right fearlessly to think independently and express his opinion about what he knows, what he has personally thought about and experienced, and not merely to express with slightly different variations the opinion which has been inculcated in him.

To the extent that tenure supports academic freedom, I support tenure. I want no person or system to have any power, real or apparent, to chill academic freedom.

You must avoid letting anyone usurp your freedom of thought in any way, whether on religious or other grounds. People must use their minds and think and there are situations where the use of the intellect is necessary so that excessive fantasy or fancy can be held in check.

A thinking man can never be a party man.

Academic freedom is simply a way of saying that we get the best results in education and research if we leave their management to people who know something about them.

Academic freedom carries with it the right to heresy as well as the right to restate and defend the traditional views.

The proper business of a University is ... not to tell us ... what we ought to believe, and make us accept the belief as a duty; but to give us information and training, and help us to form our own beliefs in a manner worthy of intelligent beings.

Freedom of speech and freedom of action are meaningless without freedom to think. And there is no freedom of thought without doubt.

One of the first things I think young people, especially nowadays, should learn is how to see for yourself and listen for yourself and think for yourself.

There are, by the most conservative counting, two grave and deeply regrettable collateral victims of the peer-review gruesome stratagem: one is the daring of thought (wished-washed to the lowest common denominator), and the other is the individuality, as well as the responsibility, of editors (those seeking shelter behind the anonymity of "peers", but in fact dissolved in it, in many cases without a trace).

Unquestioning obedience is for slaves, the uneducated and the pathetic.

If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which our present system induces, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness, for self-direction, and for self-initiated learning.

To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries.

Think for yourself. Know what you're doing. Question authority.