Best 149 quotes in «free speech quotes» category

Whatever modern democracies may tell themselves about their commitment to free speech and to diversity of opinion, the values of a given society will uncannily match those of whichever organizations have the scale to pay for runs of thirty-second slots around the nightly news bulletin.

Whatever we poor men may not have, we have free speech, and no one can take it from us.

When the Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine's Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwah, I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendship—though I like to think that my reaction would have been the same if I hadn't known Salman at all. To re-state the premise of the argument again: the theocratic head of a foreign despotism offers money in his own name in order to suborn the murder of a civilian citizen of another country, for the offense of writing a work of fiction. No more root-and-branch challenge to the values of the Enlightenment (on the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille) or to the First Amendment to the Constitution, could be imagined. President George H.W. Bush, when asked to comment, could only say grudgingly that, as far as he could see, no American interests were involved…

When society gives censors wide and vague powers they never confine themselves to deserving targets. They are not snipers, but machine-gunners. Allow them to fire at will, and they will hit anything that moves.

With false names, on the right nets, they could be anybody. Old men, middle-aged women, anybody, as long as they were careful about the way they wrote. All that anyone would see were the words, their ideas. Every citizen started equal, on the nets.

You don’t win a debate by suppressing discussion; you win it with a better argument.

Ye cannot make us now lesse capable, lesse knowing, lesse eagarly pursuing of the Truth, unlesse ye first make yourselves that made us so, lesse the lovers, lesse the founders of our true Liberty. We can grow ignorant again, brutish, formall, and slavish as ye found us, but you then must first become that which ye cannot be, oppressive, arbitrary, and tyrannous as they were from whom ye have free'd us.

Because if you don't stand up for the stuff you don't like, when they come for the stuff you do like, you've already lost.

Children are not being assaulted by images that appear on a computer screen. Any Internet user knows it is quite difficult to stumble across pornography.

Equally, the Internet interprets attempts at proprietary control as threats and mobilizes to defeat them.

Comics definitely embody the importance of practicing free speech.

Describing the Internet as the Network of Networks is like calling the Space Shuttle, a thing that flies.

Free speech is a bourgeois prejudice.

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

Free speech in Bangladesh can get you killed

Free speech is life itself.

Free speech is the cornerstone to every right we have.

The deadliest bullshit is odorless, and transparent.

I like something with 'vice' in it.

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

None but the dead have free speech.

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

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

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.

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

The best answer to bad speech is good speech

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

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

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

There is a point beyond which even justice becomes unjust.

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

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.

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

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 must stand for free speech in the streets.

A succession of philosophers and historians spent their time studiously attempting to say nothing as successfully as possible. The less that was successfully said, the greater the relief and acclaim. No attempt to address any idea, history or fact was able to pass without first being put through the pit-stop of the modern academy. No generality could be attempted and no specific could be uttered.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Et quand l'actu tue au royaume des aveugles, il y a des borgnes à ne pas dépasser. - Charlie Hebdo

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.

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.