Quotes · Skopia

10 quotes

SortEditorial Year Length

Topic·Freedom of thought✕clear

Political literature

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.

Areopagitica · 1644

★ 1.2

And I honor the man who is willing to sink Half his present repute for the freedom to think, And, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak, Will risk t' other half for the freedom to speak.

James Russell Lowell

A Fable of Critics · 1848

★ 1.8

Supreme Court opinion · Legal opinion · Legal writing

If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.

Robert H. Jackson

West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette · 1943

★ 3.5

Speech · Political speech

Freedom of thought and the right of private judgment, in matters of conscience, driven from every other corner of the earth, direct their course to this happy country as their last asylum.

1776

★ 3.5

When people talk of the Freedom of Writing, Speaking or thinking, I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. 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.

Letter to Thomas Jefferson, July 15, 1817 · 1817

★ 3.6

Film · Epic (film) · Historical drama (film) · Epic · Historical drama

You can break a man's skull, you can arrest him, you can throw him into a dungeon. But how do you control what's up here? How do you fight an idea?

Ben-Hur · 1959

★ 3.6

Essay · Feminist literature

There is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

A Room of One's Own · 1929

★ 3.8

Political literature

It is a very great thing to be able to think as you like; but, after all, an important question remains: what you think.

Democracy · 1861

★ 5.3

Philosophical literature

The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities.

1987

★ 5.3

Supreme Court opinion · Legal opinion · Legal writing

If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

United States v. Schwimmer · 1929

★ 6.0