Best 149 quotes in «free speech quotes» category

Vi har noen rettigheter, plikter og verdier vi tar som en selvfølge. Men også selvfølgelighetene må begrunnes og forsvares. De oppleste og vedtatte sannhetene har godt av å bli utfordret, ikke minst for å gi oss anledning til å lese dem opp og vedta dem på nytt.

We are all free to be assholes, but we are not free to do so without consequence.

We are free to speak as we choose without fear of prosecution or persecution, but we are not free to speak as we choose without consequence.

We feel this is a matter of free speech, people should have the right to put alternative views across and criticise multinationals, especially those who spend a fortune pushing their own propaganda.

We live in a world in which people are censured, demoted, imprisoned, beheaded, simply because they have opened their mouths, flapped their lips, and vibrated some air. Yes, those vibrations can make us feel sad or stupid or alienated. Tough shit. That's the price of admission to the marketplace of ideas. Hateful, blasphemous, prejudiced, vulgar, rude, or ignorant remarks are the music of a free society, and the relentless patter of idiots is how we know we're in one. When all the words in our public conversation are fair, good, and true, it's time to make a run for the fence.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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

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

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.

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.

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

Free speech in Bangladesh can get you killed

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.

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

Free speech is life itself.

Free speech is the cornerstone to every right we have.

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.

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

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.

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

The deadliest bullshit is odorless, and transparent.

The best answer to bad speech is good speech

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

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.

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

There is a point beyond which even justice becomes unjust.

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

When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Efforts to silence the people who raised their voice – whether through violence, intimidation or the courts – meant that three decades after the Rushdie affair there was almost no one in Europe who would dare write a novel, compose a piece of music or even draw an image that might risk Muslim anger. Indeed, they ran in the other direction. Politicians and almost everybody else went out of their way to show how much they admired Islam.