Liberty of Thought Quotes

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

All I claim, all I plead for, is liberty of thought and expression. That is all. I do not pretend to tell what is absolutely true, but what I think is true. I do not pretend to tell all the truth..

Free expression is the base of human rights, the root of human nature and the mother of truth. To kill free speech is to insult human rights, to stifle human nature and to suppress truth.

Roger Williams... successfully vindicated the right of private judgment in matters of conscience, and effected a moral and political revolution in all governments of the civilized world.

When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.

Freedom of speech is freedom above all for those whose views you dislike most.

Our Founders always wondered about how long it would last. The price of liberty is everlasting vigilance. You've got to be on your guard every minute or you will lose it.

Intellectual freedom is essential -- freedom to obtain and distribute information, freedom for open-minded and unfearing debate and freedom from pressure by officialdom and prejudices. Such freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of people by mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorship.

Freedom is a very great reality, but it means above all things, freedom from lies.

In every country where man is free to think and to speak, difference of opinion will arise from difference of perception, and the imperfection of reason; but these differences, when permitted, as in this happy country, to purify themselves by free discussion, are but as passing clouds overspreading our land transiently, and leaving our horizon more bright and serene.

The forefathers of the United States were children of religious bigotry and persecution, and, as a result, fled Britain to create a new approach to life and government. They valued intellect and education. In fact, they outlined the principles of the United States' democracy to establish intellectual freedom from the Church.

When an oriental who, throughout his life, has lived in his own country, where the will of his Sovereign is supreme, and the personal liberty of the subject unknown, first sets foot on the soil of the United States, he breathes an atmosphere unlike anything he has ever known… he is lost in wonderment.

Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts.

The right to discuss freely and openly, by speech, by the press, by the pen, all political questions, and to examine and animadvert upon all political institutions ... [is] a right as clear and certain, so interwoven with our other liberties, so necessary, in fact to their existence, that without is we must fall at once into despotism and anarchy.

We are called the nation of inventors. And we are. We could still claim that title and wear its loftiest honors if we had stopped with the first thing we ever invented, which was human liberty.

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.

The combined wisdom and genius of all mankind cannot possibly conceive of an argument against liberty of thought.

He goes seeking liberty, which is so dear, as he knows who for it renounces life.

To people like me, educated in post-war Britain, free speech has been a firm premise of the British way of life.

The first principle of a free society is an untrammeled flow of words in an open forum.

Such being the happiness of the times, that you may think as you wish, and speak as you think.

We are as great as our belief in human liberty—no greater.

'Freedom' means freedom from the mind. Then you are simply in a silence, and in that silence you melt, you merge with the whole. And to melt and merge with the whole is to be holy. Not by fasting, not by torturing, but by becoming one with the whole, one becomes holy.

In this country you can say aloud or publish just about anything you like.