Famous Quotes Regarding
Censorship and Free Speech
"Without
free speech no search for truth is possible... no
discovery of truth is useful... Better a thousandfold
abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. The
abuse dies in a day, but the denial slays the life of
the people, and entombs the hope of the race." - Charles Bradlaugh
"Debate
on public issues should be uninhibited, robust and
wide-open and that...may well include vehement,
caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on
government and public officials." - William Brennan, New York
Times v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964)
"Everyone is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day
passes without its being extolled, but some people's
idea of it is that they are free to say what they
like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is
an outrage." - Winston
Churchill
"Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are
going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that
they ever existed." - Dwight
D. Eisenhower, speech at Dartmouth College, June
14, 1953
"Every burned book enlightens the world." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a
little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor
safety." - Benjamin
Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania
"One man's vulgarity is another's lyric." - John Marshall Harlan, Cohen
v. California, 403 U.S. 15 (1971)
"To
prohibit the reading of certain books is to declare
the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves." -
Claude Adrien Helvetius, De
l' Homme
"Civil government cannot let any group ride roughshod
over others simply because their consciences tell them
to do so." - Robert H.
Jackson
"Books and ideas are the most effective weapons
against intolerance and ignorance." - Lyndon Baines Johnson, February
11, 1964
"It
is impossible for ideas to compete in the marketplace
if no forum for their presentation is provided or
available." - Thomas Mann
"And yet on the other hand unless warinesse be us'd,
as good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book; who
kills a Man kills a reasonable creature, Gods Image,
but hee who destroyes a good Booke, kills reason it
selfe, kills the Image of God, as it were in the eye."
- Milton, Areopagitica
"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." - Wiliam O. Douglas, The One
Un-American Act, A Speech to the Author's Guild
Council in New York (1951)
"Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on
whatever pretense, has always been and always be the
last resort of the boob and the bigot." - Eugene O'Neill
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to
offend, it ceases to exist." - Salman Rushdie
"Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in
itself. It is the hallmark of an authoritarian
regime..." - Potter
Stewart, Ginzberg v. United States, 383
U.S. 463 (1966)
"Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak
just because a baby can't chew it." - Mark Twain
"The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated
book." - Walt Whitman
