Quotations on FREE SPEECH & FREEDOM of the PRESS

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise therof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for redress of grievances. - First Amendment to the Bill of Rights, United States Constitution "Let us dare to read, think, speak and write." - John Adams, Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law, 1765 * * * To permit freedom of expression is primarily for the benefit of the majority, because it protects criticism, and criticism leads to progress. - Harry S. Truman * * * "If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all." - Noam Chomsky * * * "It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have these three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence to practice neither. - Mark Twain * * * "Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom." - Benjamin N. Cardozo * * * "The citizen's job is to be rude--to pierce the comfort of professional intercourse by boorish expressions of doubt." - John Ralston Saul, The Doubter's Companion * * * "The magic word before whose power Even the people's masters cower, Flapping their wigs officiously-- Prick up your ears; the word--it is publicity." - Late 18th Century German verse * * * The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing. - John Adams * * * "Whenever citizens are seen routinely as enemies of their own government, writers are routinely seen to be the most dangerous enemies." - E.L. Doctorow * * * "We who have a Voice must be a Voice for the Voiceless!" - Oscar Romero, 1980 * * * "...The Director General invites you to examine the planisphere hanging on the wall. The varied color scheme indicates: 1) the countries where all books are systematically confiscated 2) the countries where only books published or approved by the State may circulate 3) the countries where existing censorship is crude, approximate, and unpredictable 4) the countries where the censorship is subtle, informed, sensitive to implications and allusions, managed by meticulous and sly intellecuals 5) the countries where there are two networks of dissemination: one legal and one clandestine 6) the countries where there is no censorship because there are no books, but there are many potential readers 7) the countries where there are no books and nobody complains about their absence 8) the countries, finally, in which every day, books are produced for all tastes and all ideas, amid general indifference. Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do..." - Italo Calvino * * * "When information is obliterated in a country, political problems no longer arouse public opinion - they have reality only for the enemies of the regime, and are promulgated by unorganized individuals." - Jacques Ellul, The Political Illusion * * * "In America - as elsewhere - free speech is confined to the dead." - Mark Twain, Notebook, 1904 * * * "In a free society, standards of public morality can be measured only by whether physical coercion - violence against persons or property - occurs. There is no right not to be offended by words, actions or symbols." - Richard E. Sincere, Jr. * * * "My people and I have come to an agreement which satisfies us both. They are to say what they please, and I am to do what I please." - Frederick the Great * * * "Republic. I like the sound of the word. It means people can live free, talk free, go or come, buy or sell, be drunk or sober, however they choose." - John Wayne * * * "It gives me great pleasure indeed to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed." - Albert Einstein * * * "Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us." - Justice William O. Douglas * * * "Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burned women. It is the function of free speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears." - Justice Louis D. Brandeis * * * "You hear about constitutional rights, free speech and free press. Every time I hear these words I say to myself, 'That man is a Red!' You never hear a real American talk like that!" - Mayor Frank Hague * * * "I am for the First Amendment from the first word to the last. I believe it means what it says." - Justice Hugo Black * * * "It's easy for people to assume that the Bill of Rights will be, as somebody once called the Constitution, a machine that runs itself. I disagree. I think eternal vigilance is the price of keeping it in working order." - Judge Lawrence Tribe * * * "I may disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Voltaire * * * "Voltaire gloried in the name Deist. The Catholic Church in 18th-century France did not recognize fine distinctions among heretics, and Deist and atheist works were burned in the same bonfires." - Encyclopedia Britannica * * * "The literature of a people must so ring from the sense of its nationality; and nationality is impossible without self-respect, and self-respect is impossible without liberty." - Harriet Beecher Stowe * * * "We must never forget that if the war in Vietnam is lost the right of free speech will be extinguished throughout the world." - Richard Nixon, October 27, 1965 * * * "The citizen who criticizes his country is paying it an implied tribute." - J. William Fulbright, speech, April 28, 1966 * * * "I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." - James Madison, speech, June 16, 1788 * * * "Liberty of speech inviteth and provoketh liberty to be used again, and so bringeth much to a man's knowledge." - Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, 1605 * * * "We almost all of our knowledge not to those who have agreed, but to those who have differed." - Caleb Colton, Lacon, 1820-22 * * * "Free speech is to a great people what winds are to oceans and malarial regions, which waft away the elements of disease, and bring new elements of health. Where free speech is stopped miasma is bred, and death comes fast." - Henry Ward Beecher, Royal Truths, 1862 * * * "Free speech does not live many hours after free industry and free commerce die." - Herbert Hoover, speech, October 22, 1928 * * * "If men's minds were as easily controlled as their tongues, every king would sit on his throne, and government by compulsion would cease." - Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Theologicus - Politicus, 1670 * * * "Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us." - William O. Douglas, speech, December 3, 1952 * * * "It is our attitude toward free thought and free expression that will determine our fate. There must be no limit on the range of temperate discussion, no limits on thoughts. No subject must be taboo. No censor must preside at our assemblies." - William O. Douglas, speech, December 3, 1952 * * * "Where men cannot freely convey their thoughts to one another, no other liberty is secure." - William Ernest Hocking, Freedom of the Press, 1947 * * * "The only way to make sure people you agree with can speak is to support the rights of people you don't agree with." - Eleanor Holmes Norton, in New York Post, March 28, 1970 * * * "There is no nation so poor that it cannot afford free speech, but ther are few elites which will put up with the bother of it." - Daniel P. Moynihan, in Time, January 26, 1976 * * * "By placing discretion in the hands of an official to grant or deny a license, such a statute creates a threat of censorship that by its very existence chills free speech." - Harry A. Blackmun, Roe v. Wade; Doe v. Bolton, 1973 * * * "Everyone is in favor of free speech... but some people's idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage." - Winston S. Churchill, speech, October 13, 1943 * * * "Every man has a right to utter what he thinks is truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it." - Samuel Johnson, in James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, 1791 * * * "The American feels so rich in his opportunities for free expression that he often no longer knows what he is free from. Neither does he know where he is not free; he does not recognize his native autocrats when he sees them." - Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society, 1950 * * * "The freedom of the press is one of the great bulwarks of liberty, and can never be restrained but by despotic governments." - George Mason, Virginia Bill of Rights, June 12, 1776 * * * "The chief danger which threatens the influence and honor of the press is the tendency of its liberty to degenerate into license." - James A. Garfield, speech, July 11, 1878 * * * ""Freedom of the press is perhaps the freedom that has suffered the most from the gradual degradation of the idea of liberty." - Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, 1960 * * * "The liberty of the press is always bound to favorable opportunities, and accordingly will never be an absolute liberty; Not in the State, but only against it can liberty of the press be carried through." - Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own, 1845 * * * "When a person goes to a country and finds their newspapers filled with nothing but good news, he can bet there are good men in jail." - Daniel P. Moynihan, in University Daily Kansan, February 16, 1977 * * * "The price of justice is eternal publicity." - Arnold Bennett, Things That Have Interested Me, "Secret Trials," 1923 * * * "In order to have the inestimable benefits that the liberty of the press ensures, it is necessary to submit to the inevitable evils that it creates." - Alexis D. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835 * * * "We have all of us at times suffered from the liberty of the press, but we have to take the good with the bad." - Theodore Roosevelt, speech, March 27, 1883 * * * "I have lent myself willingly... to demonstrate the falsehood of the pretext that freedom of the press is incompatible with orderly government." - Thomas Jefferson, letter, February 11, 1807 * * * "Wherever books will be burned, men also, in the end, are burned." - Heinrich Heine, Almansor, 1823 * * * "Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed." - Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech, June 14, 1953 * * * "In general, we have as natural a right to make use of our pens as of our tongue, at our peril, risk, and hazard. I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil." - Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, "Liberty of the Press," 1764 * * * "The censor's sword pierces deeply into the heart of free expression." - Earl Warren, Times Film Corporation v. City of Chicago, January 23, 1961 * * * "If they can ban me from speaking... what good is freedom of speech? I've never feared criminal prosecution, because I'd get to cross-examine their claims while they were under oath. It never dawned on me that they could ever ban a book... especially when they can't present, subject to cross-examination, what in my book is wrong." - Irwin Schiff, statement after a federal judge banned his book "The Federal Mafia: How the Government Illegally Imposes and Unlawfully Collects Income Taxes", March 19, 2003 * * * "If the courts can and will now ban books simply by dubbing them 'nonsense' because they challenge what 'everybody knows,' will they next ban celebrated UCLA biomedical researcher Dr. Peter Duesberg's book, 'Inventing the AIDS Virus,' which challenges the notion that HIV causes AIDS? New York state teacher of the year John Taylor Gatto's book 'Dumbing Us Down,' which argues the public schools are purposely designed to churn out psychologically damaged quasi-literates -- and that the more money we spend on these youth behavior modification camps the worse these pathologies become? The work of John Lott and professor Gary Kleck, demonstrationg that crime rates go down wherever more law-abiding citizens own and carry guns? "After all, Galileo's works challenged 'what everyone knew' in the early 1600s, didn't they -- as had William Harvey's work on the circulation of the blood half a century earlier?" - Vin Suprynowicz, column, April 30, 2003 * * * "We can not for a moment admit that by simply applying an unpopular or obloquious name to men, whether that name be anarchist, or socialist, capitalist, or vagabond, republican or democrat, an officer can be justified in depriving men of rights guaranteed by the fundamental law, and can break up their meeting, can club, search and imprison them, not for what they have done, but for what he, in his wisdom, or his prejudice, or his caprice, fears they might do. "If this principle were once admitted, there is no limit to its application. While it is sought to apply it to one class today, it could be applied to any other class tomorrow, and a precedent made in one case would be sure to be cited and acted on in another, and a political party, for the time being in power, could prevent its opponents from meeting and put them in jail." - John Peter Altgeld, (1847-1902) Governor of Illinois, November 14, 1891 * * * "A newspaper is a private enterprise, owing nothing to the public." - Wall Street Journal, January 20, 1925 * * * "If we are going to have freedom, we are going to have to let people act foolishly as well as wisely." Sam J. Ervin, 1970 * * * "Truth is not only violated by falsehood; it may be equally outraged by silence." – Henri Frederic Amiel * * * "For the average American, freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more." – Gore Vidal * * * "The freedom of speech and the freedom of the press have not been granted to the people in order that they may say things which please, and which are based upon accepted thought, but the right to say the things which displease, the right to say the things which convey the new and yet unexpected thoughts, the right to say things, even though they do a wrong." – Samuel Gompers (1850-1924), Seventy Years of Life and Labor, 1925 * * * "Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought." – Graham Greene * * * "To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or knaves." – Claude-Adrien Helvetius * * * "Where men cannot freely convey their thoughts to one another, no other liberty is secure." – William E. Hocking (1873-1966), Freedom of the Press, 1947 * * * "The liberty of the press is not confined to newspapers and periodicals. It necessarily embraces pamphlets and leaflets. These indeed have been historic weapons in the defense of liberty, as the pamphlets of Thomas Paine and others in our history abundantly attest." – Charles Evans Hughes (1862-1948), U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Lovell v. City of Griffin, 1938 * * * "If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch." – Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993), U.S. Supreme Court Justice, 1969 * * * "If the fires of freedom and civil liberties burn low in other lands, they must be made brighter in our own. If in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored, we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free. If in other lands the eternal truths of the past are threatened by intolerance, we must provide a safe place for their perception." – Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945), U.S. President, Speech, 6/30/38 * * * "The most esteemed journalists are precisely the most servile. For it is by making themselves useful to the powerful that they gain access to the 'best' sources." – Walter Karp (1934-1989), American Journalist and Political Theorist * * * "The majority of Americans get their news and information about what is going on with their government from entities that are licensed by and subject to punishment at the hands of that very government." – Neal Boortz * * *