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More "Freethinker" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... they do not much mind where they give it. But Chesterton, unlike most public men who deal in general ideas, did not come to the idea of public speaking through the Protestant tradition but through the secular tradition, the freethinker's debate, the political and not the religious side of Hyde Park oratory, where men in knots shout one another down, not where some lonely longhaired prophet declaims conversion. After he became a Catholic he sought to set himself frontiers, the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... the "Search Dialogues" of Plato. In the "Exposition Dialogues" it is wanting; and in the "Topica," where Eristic is reduced to method and system by one of Aristotle's greatest logical achievements, the freethinker's wings are very much clipt; the execution of Socrates probably had to answer for that. It is to the Platonic dialogues that we look for the full grandeur of Grecian debate in all its phases. The ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... unabashed self-portraiture of the ESSAYS he had his great exemplar for the Confessions. Even in the very different case of Voltaire, we may go at least as far as Villemain and say that the essayist must have helped to shape the thought of the great freethinker; whose Philosophe Ignorant may indeed be connected with the APOLOGY without any of the hesitation with which Villemain suggests his general parallel. In fine, Montaigne has scattered his pollen over all the literature of France. The most typical thought of La Rochefoucauld is ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... first instance, the National Defence hesitated to employ him; secondly, they wished to subordinate him to Cambriels, and he declined to take any such position; not that he objected to serve under any superior commander who would treat him fairly, but because he, Garibaldi, was a freethinker, and knew that he was bitterly detested by the fervently Catholic generals, such as Cambriels. As it happened, he secured an independent command. But in exercising it he had to co-operate with Cambriels ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... accused of pietism, particularly in Germany, by men who could not distinguish between pietism and piety, just as in England he was attacked as a freethinker by men who never knew the freedom of the children of God. "Christianity is ours, not theirs," he would frequently say of those who made religion a mere profession, and imagined they knew Christ because they held a crosier and wore a mitre. ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... people covered all the streets; expecting, watching, and praying. But as the day wore away, their fears first began to abate, then lessened every hour, at night they were almost extinct, till the total darkness, that hitherto used to terrify, now comforted every freethinker and atheist. Great numbers went together to the taverns, bespoke suppers, and broke up whole hogsheads for joy. The subject of all wit and conversation was to ridicule the prophecy, and rally each other. All the quality and gentry were perfectly ashamed, nay, some ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... antiquary, who tried to do for his own university what Woodward had done for Oxford, was all but a Catholic, and in political sympathies agreed with Hearne and Carte. Walpole was a thorough Whig and a freethinker, so long, at least, as freethinking did not threaten danger to comfortable sinecures bestowed upon the sons of Whig ministers. But Cole became Walpole's antiquarian oracle. When Walpole came back from the grand tour, with nothing particular to do except spend his income, he found one amusement in ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... sect, with rare exceptions, preached, especially the Presbyterians, that the vast majority even of Christians would be damned, thereby giving to the devil that far greater power than God against which Bishop Agobard had protested. As for a freethinker or infidel, he was pointed at in the streets; and if a man had even seen a "Deist," he spoke of it as if he had beheld a murderer. Against all this some ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... "Mr. Bates," I append a narrative given me verbally by Miss Hartly, who, like Mr. Bates, had, up to the time of her experience, posed as a pronounced and somewhat bitter sceptic. She was an emphatic freethinker, and had then no belief whatsoever in a future life. Now she believes "a ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... denies all Divine interference in the affairs of the earth. A great authority for the Materialists—they have none greater! They can show on their side no intellect equal to Caesar's! And yet this magnificent freethinker, rejecting a soul and a Deity, habitually entered his chariot muttering a charm; crawled on his knees up the steps of a temple to propitiate the abstraction called 'Nemesis;' and did not cross the Rubicon till he had consulted the omens. What does all this prove?—a ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... physiognomy was rather disagreeable than otherwise. A pair of thick black eyebrows almost covered the eyes of him; his look had in it something ominous, presage of the fate he met with: a tawny skin, torn by small-pox, increased his ugliness. He affected the freethinker, and carried libertinism to excess; a great deal of ambition and headlong rashness accompanied this vice." A dangerous adviser here in the Berlin element, with lightnings going!"Such a favorite was not the man to bring back my Brother from his ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
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