The Quotes canon
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Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Allan Bloom1 quote
The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities. — Allan Bloom · 1987James Russell Lowell1 quote
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 · 1848John Adams1 quote
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. — John Adams · 1817John Milton1 quote
Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties. — John Milton · 1644Matthew Arnold1 quote
It is a very great thing to be able to think as you like; but, after all, an important question remains: what you think. — Matthew Arnold · 1861Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.1 quote
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. · 1929Robert H. Jackson1 quote
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 · 1943Samuel Adams1 quote
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. — Samuel Adams · 1776Sextus1 quote
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? — Sextus · 1959Virginia Woolf1 quote
There is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind. — Virginia Woolf · 1929