Best 149 quotes in «free speech quotes» category

Free speech in Bangladesh can get you killed

Free speech is meaningless if the commercial cacophony has risen to the point where no one can hear you.

Free speech is a bourgeois prejudice.

Free speech is life itself.

It's obvious that I come down on the side of free speech for anybody's work.

Free speech is the cornerstone to every right we have.

If pornographers are among the early adopters of the new technology, then it has definite commercial possibilities.

In the United States, unlike any other advanced democracy, money really talks. Our Supreme Court has said that spending money on politicians is a form of free speech. No other court has said that.

I like something with 'vice' in it.

The censor's sword pierces deeply into the heart of free expression.

Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.

Speech doesn't corrupt. Money corrupts, and money isn't speech.

None but the dead have free speech.

The best answer to bad speech is good speech

The great thing about the Internet is that it will not abide by the rules.

The first amendment protects free speech, but if you don't have freedom of thought, do you really have freedom of speech?

The deadliest bullshit is odorless, and transparent.

The remedy for the abuse of free speech is more speech.

The right to free speech is more important than the content of the speech.

When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl.

We travel the world, and our right to free speech is precious.

When a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy, it ceases to be a subject of interest.

Where there is a great deal of free speech there is always a certain amount of foolish speech.

There is a point beyond which even justice becomes unjust.

You must stand for free speech in the streets.

Where's there's money involved, there are no good guys.

And what doe they tell us vainly of new opinions, when this very opinion of theirs, that none must be heard but whom they like, is the worst and newest opinion of all others, and is the chief cause why sects and schisms doe so much abound and true knowledge is kept at distance from us ; besides yet a greater danger which is in it.

You have to organize, organize, organize, and build and build, and train and train, so that there is a permanent, vibrant structure of which people can be part.

Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.

Blasphemy is just the fanatic's name for criticism. Charb writes wisely: 'A believer can blaspheme only to the extent that the idea of blasphemy holds any meaning to him. A non-believer, no matter how hard he tries, 'cannot' blaspheme. God is sacred only to those who believe in him. If you wish to insult or offend God, you have to be sure that he exists. The strategy used by minority group activists masquerading as anti-racists is to pass off blasphemy as Islamophobia and Islamophobia as racism.' The crucial distinction we must defend is between acts of imagination and acts of violence....Faith is not the enemy. Fanaticism is the enemy. It always is. But only a fool would deny that faith has been the seedbed of fanaticism in mankind's long and sorry struggle for the light. As much as at times we need to seek "solidarity" among unlike groups, we also need to "desolidarize," to "unsolidarize"—to put the people we know before the abstract categories we imagine. Come to think of it, making people, with all their flaws, fully visible while leaving generalized types alone is exactly what the caricaturist has always done for us. It's his special form of bravery.

A study of the San Francisco Beat enclave by psychiatrist Dr. Francis Rigney in the late 1950's showed 60 percent "were so psychotic or crippled by tensions, anxiety and neurosis as to be nonfunctional in the competitive world." In contrast, the several studies released so far made of the student radicals at Berkeley show them to be stable, serious, and of above-average intelligence. The point is that the Beats had to "cop out" of the Rat Race because they couldn't perform; the New Left chooses to reject a society it could easily be successful in.

Both groups [of pundits] were critics, and that is the heart of the problem. If you are a pundit, you seem so smart when you are telling the President what he did wrong… This [is] mostly BS.

Can't you shut that dog up?" The boy gave me a pitying look. "Not really," he said. "Vlad's a believer in free speech.

Censorship is an assault on our intelligence…not an insult.

De som har makt over ordene bør være edru blant de rasende.

Discourse and critical thinking are essential tools when it comes to securing progress in a democratic society. But in the end, unity and engaged participation are what make it happen.

Every man — in the development of his own personality — has the right to form his own beliefs and opinions. Hence, suppression of belief, opinion and expression is an affront to the dignity of man, a negation of man’s essential nature." [Toward a General Theory of the First Amendment (1963)]

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.

Faced with a brass band that was positioned to drown out free speech, Russian activists reacted to the potential confrontation with lemons. With activists eating lemons or pretending to, involuntary saliva reaction of the band made it impossible for them to interrupt.

Feminists often pretend to be angry and offended in order to win debates or, I should say, prevent debates from ever happening. If you can act angry and offended, especially on a college campus, you can shut down the other side using a speech code.

Freedom of speech as I define it is more than a right granted by government. It's a process that each of us must believe in and fight for. You cannot have free speech in a world where everyone wants to deplatform you, destroy you, discard you, or distort you for what you say. Freedom of speech only works to the extent that people embrace it. The "right" alone is meaningless.

From time to time our national history has been marred by forgetfulness of the Jeffersonian principle that restraint is at the heart of liberty. In 1789 the Federalists adopted Alien and Sedition Acts in a shabby political effort to isolate the Republic from the world and to punish political criticism as seditious libel. In 1865 the Radical Republicans sought to snare private conscience in a web of oaths and affirmations of loyalty. Spokesmen for the South did service for the Nation in resisting the petty tyranny of distrustful vengeance. In the 1920's the Attorney General of the United States degraded his office by hunting political radicals as if they were Salem witches. The Nation's only gain from his efforts were the classic dissents of Holmes and Brandeis. In our own times, the old blunt instruments have again been put to work. The States have followed in the footsteps of the Federalists and have put Alien and Sedition Acts upon their statute books. An epidemic of loyalty oaths has spread across the Nation until no town or village seems to feel secure until its servants have purged themselves of all suspicion of non-conformity by swearing to their political cleanliness. Those who love the twilight speak as if public education must be training in conformity, and government support of science be public aid of caution. We have also seen a sharpening and refinement of abusive power. The legislative investigation, designed and often exercised for the achievement of high ends, has too frequently been used by the Nation and the States as a means for effecting the disgrace and degradation of private persons. Unscrupulous demagogues have used the power to investigate as tyrants of an earlier day used the bill of attainder. The architects of fear have converted a wholesome law against conspiracy into an instrument for making association a crime. Pretending to fear government they have asked government to outlaw private protest. They glorify "togetherness" when it is theirs, and call it conspiracy when it is that of others. In listing these abuses I do not mean to condemn our central effort to protect the Nation's security. The dangers that surround us have been very great, and many of our measures of vigilance have ample justification. Yet there are few among us who do not share a portion of the blame for not recognizing soon enough the dark tendency towards excess of caution.

Having the freedom of speech doesn’t mean saying whatever you want, it means saying what’s humane, hateless and non-prejudicial.

Here comes the penalty which a land pays when it stifles free speech and free discussion and turns itself over entirely to propaganda. It does not make any difference if at the time the things advocated are absolutely right, the nation nevertheless becomes morally emasculated and mentally hog-tied, and cannot evolve that healthy difference of opinion which leads to the discovery of truth under changing conditions. -- W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America (Harcourt Brace & Company, New York, 1935, first edition), page 144

Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore — I mean, that’s how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn’t care because they’d already accepted it. It’s real scary. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Hvis du tar til orde for at Europa en gang skal bli fritt for muslimer, tar du samtidig til orde, i beste fall, for en tvangsdeportering av mer enn femti millioner mennesker vekk fra det europeiske kontinentet. I verste fall tar du til orde for voldshandlinger mot en religiøs gruppering som allerede er sterkt utsatt for fordommer og hets. Hvis målet ditt er at islam skal utryddes fra Europa, kan du ikke samtidig påstå at du er fredelig sjel som aldri har hatt som formål å skade noen. Du må skjønne at politikken du forfekter faktisk handler om mennesker. Og du må tåle å bli møtt med motargumenter. At noen motsier argumentene dine betyr ikke at du knebles. Det betyr at du deltar i debatten.

I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; — but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.

I am bound to accord you, in the name of free speech, the full right to shout, lie and write to your heart’s content. But you are bound to grant me, in the name of freedom of association, the right to enter into, or withdraw from, association with people advocating this or that view.

I am halfway through Hillary Clinton's latest called "Living History"...pretty lighthearted on the scale...unlike David Hick's autobiography...I had to skip a couple of hundred pages in the middle of that one because it was too distressing for me to read. Undoubtedly yours will be the same...I will read the beginning, skip all the awful bit in the middle and read your happy ever after bit at the end.

I don't care if they are reading our mail. Bring it on, Tron! I dare you. Try to take away my freedom of expression. I'm a journalist. A free-speech warrior. I serve in the Army of the First Amendment. I didn't take this job for the bad money, and the regressive health care coverage. I'm here for the truth, the sunshine, the casting open of closed doors!