31 Quotes About Intellectual-freedom

Censorship thrives in silence; silence is its aim.

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.

Reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.

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.

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.

The way an institution works is that you go along with the prevailing fiction.

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.

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.

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.