"Free-thinking" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Clare: They want to know thy form of prayer: Thou dost not cant, and so they stare, And hint free-thinking: They bid thee of the devil ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... followed is the most servile indolence in which life can be wasted. There are then two dangerous extremes to be shunned,—forgetfulness of the Scripture, and scorn of the divine—slavery on the one hand, free-thinking on the other. The mean is nearly as difficult to determine or keep in art as in religion, but the great danger is on the side of superstition. He who walks humbly with Nature will seldom be in danger of losing sight of Art. He ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... Pater-Noster in each. This fills every street of the city with the pious crowd. No carriages are permitted. A silence like that of Venice falls on the rattling capital. With three hundred thousand people in the street, the town seems still. In 1870, a free-thinking cabman dared to drive up the Calle Alcala. He was dragged from his box and beaten half to death by the chastened mourners, who yelled as they kicked and cuffed him, "Que bruto! He ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... had sealed the pit with a great stone; which stone might be seen by any visitor on application to the landlord of the "Angel" Inn and payment of a trifling fee. Moreover, the stone was black as your hat (unless you were a free-thinking Radical and wore a white one; in which case it was blacker). He pointed out that the name of Helleston—i.q., Hell's Stone—corroborated this tradition. He went on to say that annually, on the 8th of May, from time immemorial his parishioners had met in the streets and engaged in a public dance ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... what a Pandoric box it was opening—nor did the Divines of the latter sect ever doubt the finality of their own doctrines. They wished to replace one infallibility by another. And the same charge can be substantiated against Deism. When in this Augustan age the Free-thinking leaders, fresh from the trammels of Christism, first took the name of Moral Philosophers, they little knew they were paving the way for an Atheism they so much dreaded—a democracy more unbridled than their most constitutional wishes—a ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
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