People are tired of liberty. They have had a surfeit of it. Liberty is no longer a chaste and austere virgin…. Today’s youth are moved by other slogans…Order, Hierarchy, Discipline.more Benito Mussolini quotes |
In the most civilized and progressive countries freedom of discussion is recognized as a fundamental principle.more C. E. M. Joad quotes |
The artist and the censor differ in this wise: that the first is a decent mind in an indecent body and that the second is an indecent mind in a decent body.more George Jean Nathan quotes |
There are…certain freedoms that are like circuses. Their very existence, so long as they are individual and enjoyed chiefly individually as by spectators, diverts men’s mind from the loss of other, more fundamental, social and economic and political rights.more Robert Nisbet quotes |
Very commonly in ages when civil rights of one kind are in evidence – those pertaining to freedom of speech and thought in, say, theater, press, and forum, with obscenity and libel laws correspondingly loosened – very real constrictions of individual liberty take place in other, more vital areas: political organization, voluntary association, property, and the right to hold jobs, for example.more Robert Nisbet quotes |
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Most of us tend to think of “speech” and “press” in the relatively traditional modes of the spoken and printed word… We should bear in mind that – whatever the Framers of the Bill of Rights may have expected – the First Amendment has adapted over the years to telephones, motion pictures, radio and television broadcasting, fax, cable, and is now just beginning to take measure of digital communication.more Robert M. O'Neil quotes |
Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and will always be the last resort of the boob and the bigot.more Eugene O'Neill quotes |
Under the Equal Protection clause, not to mention the First Amendment itself, government may not grant the use of a forum to people whose views it finds acceptable, but deny use to those wishing to express less favored or more controversial views.more Supreme Court Of The United States quotes |
As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.more J. Robert Oppenheimer quotes |
Every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered...History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.more George Orwell quotes |
Loss of liberty is inimical to all forms of literature... The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition.more George Orwell quotes |
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If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.more George Orwell quotes |
Censorship is the commonest social blasphemy because it is mostly concealed, built into us by indolence, self-interest and cowardice.more John Osborne quotes |
The American constitutions were to liberty, what a grammar is to language: they define its parts of speech and practically construct them into syntax.more Thomas Paine quotes |
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The writer is the Faust of modern society, the only surviving individualist in a mass age. To his orthodox contemporaries he seems a semi-madman.more Boris Pasternak quotes |
He who does not bellow out the truth when he knows the truth makes himself the accomplice of liars and forgers.more Charles Peguy quotes |
Instead of looking on discussion as a stumbling block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all.more Pericles quotes |
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Let us always remember that he does not really believe his own opinion, who dares not give free scope to his opponent.more Wendell Phillips quotes |
No matter whose lips that would speak, they must be free and ungagged. The community which dares not protect its humblest and most hated member in the free utterance of his opinions, no matter how false or hateful, is only a gang of slaves. If there is anything in the universe that can’t stand discussion, let it crack.more Wendell Phillips quotes |
The legislature of the United States shall pass no law on the subject of religion nor touching or abridging the liberty of the press.more Charles Pinckney quotes |
Henceforth it will be the task of this Sacred Congregation not only to examine carefully the books denounced to it, to prohibit them if necessary, and to grant permission for reading forbidden books, but also to supervise, ex officio, books that are being published, and to pass sentence on such as deserve to be prohibited.more Pope Pius X quotes |
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Make no mistake about it: the labeling of someone’s language as ‘sexist’ involves a political judgment and implies the desirability of a particular sociological doctrine. One may be in favor of that doctrine (as I believe I am) but it is quite another matter to force writers by edicts and censorship into accepting it.more Neil Postman quotes |
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Former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart noted (in his dissent of Abington Township, 1963) ‘if religious exercises are held to be impermissible activity in schools, religion is placed at an artificial and state-created disadvantage. Permission for such exercises for those who want them is necessary if the schools are truly to be neutral in the matter of religion. And a refusal to permit them is seen not as the realization of state neutrality, but rather as the establishment of a religion of secularism.'more Ronald Reagan quotes |
We even had to pass a special law in the Congress just a few weeks ago to allow student prayer groups the same access to school rooms after classes that a Young Marxist Society … would already enjoy.more Ronald Reagan quotes |
The nation relies upon public discussion as one of the indispensable means to attain correct solutions to problems of social welfare. Curtailment of free speech limits this open discussion. Our whole history teaches that adjustment of social relations through reason is possible when free speech is maintained.more Stanley Forman Reed quotes |
Aside from the collective gain that comes from that free interchange of ideas, there is a direct personal value for the individual concerned. Each of us should have the right to speak his thoughts and to hear the thoughts of others…more Charles Rembar quotes |
To be able to think freely, a man must be certain that no consequence will follow whatever he writes.more Ernest Renan quotes |
The media, far from being a conspiracy to dull the political sense of the people, could be viewed as a conspiracy to disguise the extent of political indifference.more David Riesman quotes |
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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.more Franklin D. Roosevelt quotes |
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To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.more Theodore Roosevelt quotes |
Free speech exercised both individually and through a free press, is a necessity in any country where people are themselves free.more Theodore Roosevelt quotes |
During the last dozen years the tales of suppression of free assemblage, free press, and free speech, by local authorities or the State operating under martial law have been so numerous as to have become an old story. They are attacked at the instigation of an economically and socially powerful class, itself enjoying to the full the advantages of free communications, but bent on denying them to the class it holds within its power...more Edward Alsworth Ross quotes |
The worst, most insidious effect of censorship is that, in the end, it can deaden the imagination of the people. Where there is no debate, it is hard to go on remembering, every day, that there is a suppressed side to every argument.more Salman Rushdie quotes |
Freedom of speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself. What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.more Salman Rushdie quotes |
Free societies…are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom’s existence.more Salman Rushdie quotes |
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