Intellectual Freedom Quotes

“What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.”
― Salman Rushdie

“Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak

“Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“A word to the unwise.
Torch every book.
Char every page.
Burn every word to ash.
Ideas are incombustible.
And therein lies your real fear.”
― Ellen Hopkins

“The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 4: 1944-1947

“Yes, books are dangerous. They should be dangerous - they contain ideas.”
― Pete Hautman

“I hate it that Americans are taught to fear some books and some ideas as though they were diseases.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life──the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within──can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion. In the long run it will create a generation incapable of appreciating the difference between independence of thought and subservience.”
― Henry Steele Commager

“Banning books is just another form of bullying. It's all about fear and an assumption of power. The key is to address the fear and deny the power.”
― James Howe

“And no matter how much the gray people in power despise knowledge, they can’t do anything about historical objectivity; they can slow it down, but they can’t stop it. Despising and fearing knowledge, they will nonetheless inevitably decide to promote it in order to survive. Sooner or later they will be forced to allow universities and scientific societies, to create research centers, observatories, and laboratories, and thus to create a cadre of people of thought and knowledge: people who are completely beyond their control, people with a completely different psychology and with completely different needs. And these people cannot exist and certainly cannot function in the former atmosphere of low self-interest, banal preoccupations, dull self-satisfaction, and purely carnal needs. They need a new atmosphere— an atmosphere of comprehensive and inclusive learning, permeated with creative tension; they need writers, artists, composers— and the gray people in power are forced to make this concession too. The obstinate ones will be swept aside by their more cunning opponents in the struggle for power, but those who make this concession are, inevitably and paradoxically, digging their own graves against their will. For fatal to the ignorant egoists and fanatics is the growth of a full range of culture in the people— from research in the natural sciences to the ability to marvel at great music. And then comes the associated process of the broad intellectualization of society: an era in which grayness fights its last battles with a brutality that takes humanity back to the middle ages, loses these battles, and forever disappears as an actual force.”
― Arkady Strugatsky, Hard to Be a God

“Her Uncle Jaime felt that people never read what did not interest them and that if it interested them that meant they were sufficiently mature to read it.”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves.(...) That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one's own. However, thanks to the toils of those obscure women in the past, of whom I wish we knew more, thanks, curiously enough, to two wars, the Crimean which let Florence Nightingale out of her drawing-room, and the European War which opened the doors to an average woman some sixty years later, these evils are in the way to be bettered. Otherwise you [the female students listening to the talk] would not be here tonight, and your chance of earning five hundred pounds a year, precarious as I am afraid that it still is, would be minute in the extreme.

A Room of One's Own Chapter 6”
― Virginia Woolf

“Censorship thrives in silence; silence is its aim.”
― James LaRue

“In old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press. That is an improvement certainly. But still it is very bad, and wrong, and demoralizing. Somebody — was it Burke? — called journalism the fourth estate. That was true at the time no doubt. But at the present moment it is the only estate. It has eaten up the other three. The Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say and says it. We are dominated by Journalism.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Treat your mind like a museum, not a warehouse”
― Ignassen Mather , The 30 Day Media Diet

“Isn’t the point of education to teach students how to think, not what to think?”
― Lindsey Whittington

“I've always stressed the value of autonomy for intellectual and moral development. Autonomy provides us with a sphere of discretion which we all require.”
― Brian D'Ambrosio

“The way an institution works is that you go along with the prevailing fiction.”
― Howard Jacobson, J

“If you wish to find a needle in a haystack, light a match.”
― Jared Alan Brock

“The late author Philip K. Dick once said that America isn't intellectual, it's anti-intellectual. Initially, I thought that was a harsh statement. But when you see intelligent people routinely branded 'nerds" and hear about the endless school shootings in the United States, it's hard not to think he had a point.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Given the current pace of its corporatization, academia may well become the worst institution for indoctrinating and subjugating many brilliant minds that may otherwise have great potential for dissidence and creating a new worldview, which is much needed amid the global turmoil we are experiencing internationally.”
― Louis Yako

“يبدو أننا قد اعتدنا أسلوب الوصاية في كل شيء، حتى الأمور الفكرية الخاصة، بل إن وصايتهم الفكرية علينا كشعوب هي ما مكنهم من استعبادنا طوال هذه المدة. إنها الحلقة الأولى والأقوى التي مكنتهم من التحكم في مصيرنا، ولن نتحرر إلا إذا ما تحررنا فكرياً.”
― جلجامش نبيل, Gilgamesh Nabeel, صراع الأقنعة

“If the keepers of books, journals, films, compact discs, and software do not vigilantly defend free expression and intellectual freedom, who will?”
― Robert Hauptman

“The world would be a better place to live in if only each individual's thinking and actions were not subject to any political or religious ideologies.”
― Amit Abraham

“Spring of 1955 found Johnny and Klári settled into a small but comfortable house in Georgetown in Washington, D.C., Johnny having made the journey from postdoctoral immigrant to a presidential appointment in just twenty-five years. The interlude in Washington promised to lead to even more productive years ahead. “I want to become independent of the regulated academic life,” von Neumann had written to Klári from Los Alamos in 1943—a goal that was finally within reach. It was not to be.”
― George Dyson, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

“Our life experiences shape who we are and how we think. Our life’s choices can create new experiences, further shaping us. Intellectual freedom is enabled by choosing to put ourselves on an unfamiliar path.”
― Tom Golway

“Mental slavery is mental death, and every man who has given up his intellectual freedom is the living coffin of his dead soul. In this sense, every church is a cemetery and every creed an epitaph.”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, The Complete Works of Robert G. Ingersoll

“Literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes. Not only is it doomed in any country which retains a totalitarian structure; but any writer who adopts the totalitarian outlook, who finds excuses for persecution and the falsification of reality, thereby destroys himself as a writer. There is no way out of this... At some time in the future, if the human mind becomes something totally different from what it is now, we may learn to separate literary creation from intellectual honesty. At present we know only that the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity. Any writer or journalist who denies that fact — and nearly all the current praise of the Soviet Union contains or implies such a denial — is, in effect, demanding his own destruction.”
― George Orwell, The Prevention of Literature

“Freedom of the intellect means the freedom to report what one has seen, heard, and felt, and not to be obliged to fabricate imaginary facts and feelings.”
― George Orwell, The Prevention of Literature