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Not every item of news should be published. Rather must those who control news policies endeavor to make every item of news serve a certain purpose.more Joseph Paul Goebbels quotes |
To subject an artist’s work to a litmus test of political probity – and to punish institutions that will not carry out the mandate of the state – is to traffic in the thought control that gave us Stalinism and Nazism…more Richard Goldstein quotes |
Books won’t stay banned. They won’t burn. Ideas won’t go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom.more A. Whitney Griswold quotes |
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Laws to suppress tend to strengthen what they would prohibit.
This is the fine point on which all legal professions of history have based their job security.more Frank Herbert quotes |
The sooner we all learn to make a decision between disapproval and censorship, the better off society will be... Censorship cannot get at the real evil, and it is an evil in itself.more Granville Hicks quotes |
The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do.more Eric Hoffer quotes |
To some, freedom means the opportunity to do what they want to do; to most it means not to do what they do not want to do. It is perhaps true that those who can grow will feel free under any condition.more Eric Hoffer quotes |
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The First Amendment says nothing about a right not to be offended.
The risk of finding someone else's speech offensive
is the price each of us pays for our own free speech.
Free people don't run to court -- or to the principal --
when they encounter a message they don't like.
They answer it with one of their own.more Jeff Jacoby quotes |
The jury has the right to judge both the law as well as the fact in controversy.more John Jay quotes |
Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.more Thomas Jefferson quotes |
I am really mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, a fact like this can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too, as an offence against religion; that a question about the sale of a book can be carried before the civil magistrate. Is this then our freedom of religion? and are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule for what we are to read, and what we must believe? It is an insult to our citizens to question whether they are rational beings or not, and blasphemy against religion to suppose it cannot stand the test of truth and reason.more Thomas Jefferson quotes |
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If the people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny.more Thomas Jefferson quotes |
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[Censors are] people with secret attractions to various temptations... They are defending themselves under the pretext of defending others, because at heart they fear their own weaknesses.more Ernest Jones quotes |
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...[A] prohibition on moral judgments against various sexual behaviors is a violation of the freedom, even of the religious liberty, of those who view such behavior as wrong. If we don't have a right to act according to our religious belief by forming judgments according to those beliefs about human conduct and behavior, then, exactly what does the free exercise of religion mean? Can the free exercise of religion really mean simply that I have the right to believe that God has ordained certain things to be right or wrong but that I can't act accordingly? Surely free exercise means the freedom to act according to belief. And, yet, if we are not allowed to act according to belief when it comes to fundamental moral precepts, then what will be the moral implications of religion? None at all. But if we accept an understanding of religious liberty that doesn't permit us to discriminate the wheat from the chaff in our own actions and those of others, haven't we in fact permitted the government to dictate to us a uniform approach to religion? And, isn't that dictation of uniformity in religion exactly what the First Amendment intended to forbid?more Alan Keyes quotes |
Free inquiry requires that we tolerate diversity of opinion and that we respect the right of individuals to express their beliefs, however unpopular they may be, without social or legal prohibition or fear of success.more Paul Kurtz quotes |
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The liberty of thinking and publishing whatsoever each one likes, without any hindrances, is not in itself an advantage over which society can wisely rejoice. On the contrary, it is the fountainhead and origin of many evils.more Pope Leo XIII quotes |
Books of apostates, heretics, schismatics, and all other writers defending heresy or schism or in any attacking the foundations of religion, are altogether prohibited.more Pope Leo XIII quotes |
Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others.more Doris Lessing quotes |
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences.more C. S. Lewis quotes |
It is easy to think the State has a lot of different objects -- military, political, economic, and what not. But in a way things are much simpler than that. The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden -- that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time.more C. S. Lewis quotes |
The burning of an author’s books, imprisonment for opinion’s sake, has always been the tribute that an ignorant age pays to the genius of its time.more Joseph Lewis quotes |
Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile. In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize.more Sinclair Lewis quotes |
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Prohibition goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes.more Abraham Lincoln quotes |
To argue against any breach of liberty from the ill use that may be made of it, is to argue against liberty itself, since all is capable of being abused.more Lord George Lyttleton quotes |
There is surely no contradiction in saying that a certain section of the community may be quite competent to protect the persons and property of the rest, yet quite unfit to direct our opinions, or to superintend our private habits.more Thomas Babington Macaulay quotes |
Many politicians... are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool... who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.more Thomas Babington Macaulay quotes |
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Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an ailment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.more James Madison quotes |
Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it.more Maimonides quotes |
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.more Justice Thurgood Marshall quotes |
Whatever the immediate gains and losses, the dangers to our safety arising from political suppression are always greater than the dangers to the safety resulting from political freedom. Suppression is always foolish.more Neil A. McDonald quotes |
I’m going to introduce a resolution to have the postmaster general stop reading dirty books and deliver the mail.more Gail W. McGee quotes |
If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how, then, with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books should be forbid.more Herman Melville quotes |
Everything is destroyed by its own particular vice: the destructive power resides within. Rust destroys iron, moths destroy clothes, the worm eats away the wood; but greatest of all evils is envy, impious habitant of corrupt souls, which ever was, is, and shall be a consuming disease.more Menander quotes |
