Quotes on Free Speech

There is a First Amendment right to speak in a encrypted way.... The right to speak P.G.P. is like the right to speak Navajo. The Government has no particular right to prevent you from speaking in a technical manner even if it is inconvenient for them to understand.

Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm. But the harm does not interest them.

Criticism of government finds sanctuary in several portions of the 1st Amendment. It is part of the right of free speech. It embraces freedom of the press

One of the problems with defending free speech is you often have to defend people that you find to be outrageous and unpleasant and disgusting.

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds.

Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the state was to make men free to develop their faculties... They valued liberty both as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty... that public discussion is a political duty; and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government.

Free speech not only lives, it rocks!

Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it.

To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.

Curtailment of free speech is rationalized on grounds that a more compelling American tradition forbids criticism of the government when the nation is at war... Nothing can be more destructive of our fundamental democratic traditions than the vicious effort to silence dissenters.

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.

First Amendment freedoms are most in danger when the government seeks to control thought or to justify its laws for that impermissible end. The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought.

My own opinion is enough for me. And I claim the right to defend it against any consensus, any majority anywhere, any place, any time. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line and kiss my ass.

If there is no free speech, every single life has lived in vain

Acquittal of the guilty damns the judge.

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.

If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought, not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.

There is a point beyond which even justice becomes unjust.

Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation, or creed.

Free speech is intended to protect the controversial and even outrageous word; and not just comforting platitudes too mundane to need protection.