Autonomy of Thought Quotes

Do you call yourself Free? It is your ruling thought that I would hear, and not that you have escaped from a yoke.

Dissent is the mark of freedom, as originality is the mark of independence of mind. … No one can be a scientist … if he does not have independence of observation and of thought.

To deny me the right to err is therefore to deny me the right to believe.

Liberty of thinking, and of expressing our thoughts, is always fatal to priestly power…

Let every one be fully convinced in his own mind.

The mind is not a machine, it is an idea. And the Idea resists all attempts to control it.

I'm for absolute autonomy of the individual, and an adult, competent woman has absolute autonomy. It's her choice.

American poetry to me is a sort of relentless, nonstop sermon on human autonomy.

I don't like to tell people what they should or shouldn't do.

[Religious liberty was] in its nature an inalienable right ... because the opinions of men, depending only upon the evidence contemplated by their minds, cannot follow the dictates of other men.

Our freedom can be measured by the number of things we can walk away from.

If we value the pursuit of knowledge, we must be free to follow wherever that search may lead us. The free mind is no barking dog to be tethered on a ten-foot chain.

We have a right to know or may lawfully know any truth. And a right to know any truth whatsoever implies a right to think freely.

I have no intention of discussing my private life with anyone.

Everybody has to have his own style, his own game. Everybody has to be himself. I'm listening to nobody. I have my own mind, my own heart.

Liberty sustains the same relation to mind that space does to matter.

I'm no one's pet, and I intend to be an independent voice in the U.S. Senate.

Liberty - eternal spirit of the chainless mind

If philosophy is still necessary, it is so only in the way it has been from time immemorial: as critique, as resistance to the expanding heteronomy, even if only as thought's powerless attempt to remain its own master and to convict of untruth, by their own criteria, both a fabricated mythology and a conniving, resigned acquiescence.