They have an uncanny instinct for detecting whatever intellectual tendencies even remotely threaten to encroach upon their control.
John Dewey
The Public Record
John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer. He was one of the most prominent American scholars in the first half of the twentieth century.
gutenberg.org
It would be a mistake to identify the conditions which limit free communication and circulation of facts and ideas, and which thereby arrest and pervert social thought or inquiry, merely with overt forces which are obstructive.
But a belief in intellectual freedom where it does not exist contributes only to complacency in virtual enslavement, to sloppiness, superficiality and recourse to sensations as a substitute for ideas: marked traits of our present estate…
Experience shows that sometimes the sense of external oppression, as by censorship, acts as a challenge and arouses intellectual energy and excites courage.
Removal of formal limitations is but a negative condition; positive freedom is not a state but an act which involves methods and instrumentalities for control of conditions.
No man and no mind was ever emancipated merely by being left alone.
For it blurs recognition of our central need to possess conceptions which are used as tools of directed inquiry and which are tested, rectified and caused to grow in actual use.
Its currency perpetuates the infantile state of social knowledge.
The belief that thought and its communication are now free simply because legal restrictions which once obtained have been done away with is absurd.
The early history of physical knowledge, of Greek conceptions of natural phenomena, proves how inept become the conceptions of the best endowed minds when those ideas are elaborated apart from the closest contact with the events which they…
Without freedom of expression, not even methods of social inquiry can be developed.
Whatever obstructs and restricts publicity, limits and distorts public opinion and checks and distorts thinking on social affairs.