Speak, speak, speak, & remember that whenever anyone's liberty to speak is denied, your liberty is denied also, & your place is where the attack is.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of free speech and standing up for others' rights to speak.
Voltairine De Cleyre advocates for the necessity of speaking out, especially when others are oppressed or denied their freedom of expression. She highlights that true liberty is interconnected; if one person's right to speak is suppressed, it threatens everyone's freedom, and thus, one must actively defend and support those who are silenced.
In practice
In a debate about censorship, this quote can underline the importance of defending speech rights.
Anarchism, to me, means not only the denial of authority, not only a new economy, but a revision of the principles of morality. It means the development of the individual as well as the assertion of the individual. It means self-responsibility, and not leader worship.
Make no laws whatever concerning speech, and speech will be free; so soon as you make a declaration on paper that speech shall be free, you will have a hundred lawyers proving that "freedom does not mean abuse, nor liberty license," and they will define freedom out of existence.
I think it can be shown that the law makes ten criminals where it restrains one.
The question of souls is oldβwe demand our bodies, now. We are tired of promises, god is deaf, and his church is our worst enemy.
Is it not enough that 'things are cruel and blind'? Must we also be cruel and blind?
Government is as unreal, as intangible, as unapproachable as God. Try it, if you don't believe it. Seek through the legislative halls of America and find, if you can, the Government. In the end you will be doomed to confer with the agent, as before.
What is required to face trauma is the ability to mourn, fully and deeply, all that has been taken from us. Only through mourning everything we have lost can we discover that we have in fact survived; that our spirits are indestructible.
If any man has left us for fear of Nero, I shall not account him a coward; but I shall hail as a philosopher any man who has been superior to this fear, and I shall teach him all I know.
The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy... In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.
As I recovered at Walter Reed, I worried about the soldiers who pulled me out of my helicopter that Friday afternoon. Would they make it back okay? And what about all the other soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen who were also putting their lives on the line every day?
People say you have to hit rock bottom, and, I can tell you, almost dying is as rock bottom as it gets.
Those of us who submitted or surrendered our ideas and dreams and identities to the 'leaders' must take back our rights, our identities, our responsibilities.
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