Freedom of thought
(Redirected from Independence of thought)
Freedom of thought (also called freedom of conscience or freedom of ideas) is the freedom of an individual to hold or consider a fact, viewpoint, or thought, independent of others' viewpoints.
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Quotes
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- The freedom of thought is a sacred right of every individual man, and diversity will continue to increase with the progress, refinement, and differentiation of the human intellect.
- La propagande de l'erreur est libre: liberté de pensée!
- Henri Gheon, Saint Jean Bosco (Paris: E. Flammarion, 1935), p. 132.
- The propaganda of error is free; freedom of thought will not have it otherwise. (As translated by F. J. Sheed in The Secret of St John Bosco. London: Sheed and Ward, 1935, p. 129)
- The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought.
- Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays, Minorities Versus Majorities, 1910, Mother Earth Publishing
- “The biggest gift from God to man is a free mind,” [Uyghur-man Örkesh Davlet] said.
- Ruth Ingram, "There Are Christian Uyghurs, Too: New Organization Launched in London", Bitter Winter (May 31, 2023)
- It is a strange paradox if one may be forbidden to have an idea in mind that he is free to put into execution. But, apart from this, efforts to weed erroneous beliefs from the minds of men have always been supported by the argument which the Court invokes today, that beliefs are springs to action, that evil thoughts tend to become forbidden deeds. Probably so. But if power to forbid acts includes power to forbid contemplating them, then the power of government over beliefs is as unlimited as its power over conduct, and the way is open to force disclosure of attitudes on all manner of social, economic, moral and political issues.
- Robert H. Jackson, concurring in part, dissenting in part, American Communications Association v. Douds, 339 U.S. 382 (1950), at 438.
- Our forefathers found the evils of free thinking more to be endured than the evils of inquest or suppression. They gave the status of almost absolute individual rights to the outward means of expressing belief. I cannot believe that they left open a way for legislation to embarrass or impede the mere intellectual processes by which those expressions of belief are examined and formulated. This is not only because individual thinking presents no danger to society, but because thoughtful, bold and independent minds are essential to wise and considered self-government.
- Robert H. Jackson, concurring in part, dissenting in part, American Communications Association v. Douds, 339 U.S. 382 (1950), at 442.
- Progress generally begins in skepticism about accepted truths. Intellectual freedom means the right to reexamine much that has been long taken for granted. A free man must be a reasoning man, and he must dare to doubt what a legislative or electoral majority may most passionately assert. The danger that citizens will think wrongly is serious, but less dangerous than atrophy from not thinking at all. Our Constitution relies on our electorate's complete ideological freedom to nourish independent and responsible intelligence and preserve our democracy from that submissiveness, timidity and herd-mindedness of the masses which would foster a tyranny of mediocrity. The priceless heritage of our society is the unrestricted constitutional right of each member to think as he will. Thought control is a copyright of totalitarianism, and we have no claim to it. It is not the function of our Government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the Government from falling into error. We could justify any censorship only when the censors are better shielded against error than the censored.
- Robert H. Jackson, concurring in part, dissenting in part, American Communications Association v. Douds, 339 U.S. 382 (1950), at 442-443.
- The class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control over the means of mental production, so that in consequence the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are, in general, subject to it.
- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology ca. April or early May 1846
- If it is the drive of our time, after freedom of thought is won, to pursue it to that perfection through which it changes to freedom of the will in order to realize the latter as the principle of a new era.
- Max Stirner, Das unwahre Prinzip unserer Erziehung, oder: Humanismus und Realismus [The False Principle of Our Education: Or, Humanism and Realism] (1842) as translated by Ralph Myles (1967), p. 21
- But arms – instrumentalities, as President Wilson called them – are not sufficient by themselves. We must add to them the power of ideas. People say we ought not to allow ourselves to be drawn into a theoretical antagonism between Nazidom and democracy; but the antagonism is here now. It is this very conflict of spiritual and moral ideas which gives the free countries a great part of their strength. You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. On all sides they are guarded by masses of armed men, cannons, aeroplanes, fortifications, and the like – they boast and vaunt themselves before the world, yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts; words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home – all the more powerful because forbidden – terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. They make frantic efforts to bar our thoughts and words; they are afraid of the workings of the human mind. Cannons, airplanes, they can manufacture in large quantities; but how are they to quell the natural promptings of human nature, which after all these centuries of trial and progress has inherited a whole armoury of potent and indestructible knowledge?
- Winston Churchill, Broadcast to the United States and to London, 16 October 1938
- Liberty of conscience was the one great value which the common people had preserved from the Commonwealth. The countryside was ruled by the gentry, the towns by corrupt corporations, the nation by the corruptest corporation of all: but the chapel, the tavern and the home were their own. In the "unsteepled" places of worship there was room for a free intellectual life and for democratic experiments with "members unlimited". Against the background of London Dissent, with its fringe of deists and earnest mystics, William Blake seems no longer the cranky untutored genius that he must seem to those who know only the genteel culture of the time. On the contrary, he is the original yet authentic voice of a long popular tradition. If some of the London Jacobins were strangely unperturbed by the execution of Louis and Marie Antoinette it was because they remembered that their own forebears had once executed a king. No one with Bunyan in their bones could have found many of Blake's aphorisms strange: "The strongest poison ever known \ Game from Caesar's laurel crown."
- E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), pp. 51-52
- Psychology is now able to tell us with reasonable assurance that the most influential obstacle to freedom of thought and to new ideas is fear; and fear which can with inimitable art disguise itself as caution or sanity or reasoned scepticism or on occasion even as courage.
- Wilfred Trotter, "The Commemoration of Great Men" (15 February 1932), in The Collected Papers of Wilfred Trotter, F.R.S. (Oxford University Press, 1941), p. 30
- The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.
- George Washington, From George Washington to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, 18 August 1790, National Archives and Records Administration.
