Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) Father of republic India, champion of human rights, father of India's Constitution, polymath, revolutionary…
Political Science for Civil Services Main Examination (2010)
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) Father of republic India, champion of human rights, father of India's Constitution, polymath, revolutionary…
Political Science for Civil Services Main Examination (2010)
Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America
Source: Democracy in America, Volume I (1835), Chapter XV-IXX, Chapter XV.
Jayaprakash Narayan, (said at the height of the Emergency when Indira Gandhi stated that ‘food is more important than freedom’), quoted in L.K. Advani, My Country My Life (2008), also quoted at http://www.thestatesman.com/opinion/celebrating-a-legacy-96135.html <br class="br">Quotes by JP
Andrei Sakharov (1921–1989) Soviet nuclear physicist and human rights activist
Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom (1968)
Context: Intellectual freedom is essential to human society — freedom to obtain and distribute information, freedom for open-minded and unfearing debate, and freedom from pressure by officialdom and prejudices. Such a trinity of freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of people by mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorship. Freedom of thought is the only guarantee of the feasibility of a scientific democratic approach to politics, economy, and culture.
But freedom of thought is under a triple threat in modern society—from the deliberate opium of mass culture, from cowardly, egotistic, and philistine ideologies, and from the ossified dogmatism of a bureaucratic oligarchy and its favorite weapon, ideological censorship. Therefore, freedom of thought requires the defense of all thinking and honest people.
Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) Polish-American Conservative Judaism Rabbi
Volume 1, p. 191
The Prophets (1962)
Walter Reuther (1907–1970) Labor union leader
Address before the Berlin Freedom Rally, West Berlin, Germany, May 1, 1959, as quoted in Walter P Reuther: Selected Papers (1961), by Henry M. Christman, p. 279
1950s, Address before the Berlin Freedom Rally (1959)
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist
"On Descartes' Discourse touching the method of using one's reason rightly and of seeking scientific truth" (1870) http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/CE1/DesDis.html <br class="br">1870s <br class="br">Context: If some great Power would agree to make me always think what is true and do what is right, on condition of being turned into a sort of clock and wound up every morning before I got out of bed, I should instantly close with the offer. The only freedom I care about is the freedom to do right; the freedom to do wrong I am ready to part with on the cheapest terms to any one who will take it of me.
André Gide book The Immoralist
Savoir se libérer n'est rien; l'ardu, c'est savoir être libre. <br class="br">The Immoralist, Chapter 1 http://books.google.com/books?id=MPmRAAAAIAAJ&q=%22Savoir+se+lib%C3%A9rer+n'est+rien+l'ardu+c'est+savoir+%C3%AAtre+libre%22&jtp=17#v=onepage (1902) <br class="br">The Immoralist (1902)
Muhammad Qutb (1919–2014) Egyptian Islamist writer and scholar
Source: Islam: the Misunderstood Religion, Chapter 12, p. 214.