“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
― George Orwell
“I may not agree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to make an ass of yourself.”
― Oscar Wilde
“If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”
― George Washington
“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” [Special Message to the Congress on the Internal Security of the United States, August 8, 1950]”
― Harry S. Truman
“I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.”
― Voltaire
“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.”
― Theodore Roosevelt
“Freedom of speech does not protect you from the consequences of saying stupid shit. [Blog post, March 12, 2012]”
― Jim C. Hines
“My own opinion is enough for me, and I claim the right to have it defended 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.”
― Christopher Hitchens
“I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”
― James Madison
“Because if you don’t stand up for the stuff you don’t like, when they come for the stuff you do like, you’ve already lost.”
― Neil Gaiman
“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”
― John Milton, Areopagitica
“Proclaim the truth and do not be silent through fear.”
― Catherine of Siena
“Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.”
― Benjamin Franklin, Silence Dogood, The Busy-Body, and Early Writings
“It was a shocking thing to say and I knew it was a shocking thing to say. But no one has the right to live without being shocked. No one has the right to spend their life without being offended. Nobody has to read this book. Nobody has to pick it up. Nobody has to open it. And if you open it and read it, you don’t have to like it. And if you read it and you dislike it, you don’t have to remain silent about it. You can write to me, you can complain about it, you can write to the publisher, you can write to the papers, you can write your own book. You can do all those things, but there your rights stop. No one has the right to stop me writing this book. No one has the right to stop it being published, or sold, or bought, or read.”
― Philip Pullman
“Free speech means the right to shout ‘theater’ in a crowded fire.”
― Abbie Hoffman
“To view the opposition as dangerous is to misunderstand the basic concepts of democracy. To oppress the opposition is to assault the very foundation of democracy.”
― Aung San Suu Kyi, Letters from Burma
“If there’s one American belief I hold above all others, it’s that those who would set themselves up in judgment on matters of what is “right” and what is “best” should be given no rest; that they should have to defend their behavior most stringently. … As a nation, we’ve been through too many fights to preserve our rights of free thought to let them go just because some prude with a highlighter doesn’t approve of them.” [Bangor Daily News, Guest Column of March 20, 1992]”
― Stephen King
“If you’re not going to use your free speech to criticize your own government, then what the hell is the point of having it?”
― Michel Templet
“Sometimes a people lose their right to remain silent when pressured to remain silent.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy
“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.” [The One Un-American Act, Speech to the Author’s Guild Council in New York, on receiving the 1951 Lauterbach Award (December 3, 1952)]”
― William O. Douglas
“In many respects, the United States is a great country. Freedom of speech is protected more than in any other country. It is also a very free society. In America, the professor talks to the mechanic. They are in the same category.”
― Noam Chomsky
“Until every soul is freely permitted to investigate every book, and creed, and dogma for itself, the world cannot be free. Mankind will be enslaved until there is mental grandeur enough to allow each man to have his thought and say. This earth will be a paradise when men can, upon all these questions differ, and yet grasp each other’s hands as friends. It is amazing to me that a difference of opinion upon subjects that we know nothing with certainty about, should make us hate, persecute, and despise each other. Why a difference of opinion upon predestination, or the trinity, should make people imprison and burn each other seems beyond the comprehension of man; and yet in all countries where Christians have existed, they have destroyed each other to the exact extent of their power. Why should a believer in God hate an atheist? Surely the atheist has not injured God, and surely he is human, capable of joy and pain, and entitled to all the rights of man. Would it not be far better to treat this atheist, at least, as well as he treats us?
Christians tell me that they love their enemies, and yet all I ask is—not that they love their enemies, not that they love their friends even, but that they treat those who differ from them, with simple fairness.
We do not wish to be forgiven, but we wish Christians to so act that we will not have to forgive them. If all will admit that all have an equal right to think, then the question is forever solved; but as long as organized and powerful churches, pretending to hold the keys of heaven and hell, denounce every person as an outcast and criminal who thinks for himself and denies their authority, the world will be filled with hatred and suffering. To hate man and worship God seems to be the sum of all the creeds.”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, Some Mistakes of Moses
“If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union, or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated, where reason is left free to combat it.” [First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801]”
― Thomas Jefferson, The Inaugural Speeches and Messages of Thomas Jefferson, Esq.: Late President of the United States: Together with the Inaugural Speech of James Madison, Esq. …
“Government has no right to hurt a hair on the head of an Atheist for his Opinions. Let him have a care of his Practices. {Letter to his son and future president, John Quincy Adams, 16 June 1816}”
― John Adams, The Portable John Adams
“The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion. In the long run it will create a generation incapable of appreciating the difference between independence of thought and subservience.”
― Henry Steele Commager
“Somehow freedom for religious expression has become freedom from religious expression.”
― Dinesh D’Souza, What’s So Great About Christianity
“Most people do not really want others to have freedom of speech, they just want others to be given the freedom to say want they want to hear.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana
“Freedom is an absolute state, there is no such thing as being half-free.”
― Daniel Delgado F
“Religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.”
― Philip Pullman
“Hypocrites get offended by the truth.”
― Jess C. Scott, Bad Romance: Seven Deadly Sins Anthology
“Too many adults wish to ‘protect’ teenagers when they should be stimulating them to read of life as it is lived.”
― Margaret A. Edwards
“This is slavery, not to speak one’s thought.”
― Euripides, The Phoenician Women
“Beware: open-mindedness will often say, ‘Everything is permissible except a sharp opinion.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy
“Censors never go after books unless kids already like them. I don’t even think they know to go after books until they know that children are interested in reading this book, therefore there must be something in it that’s wrong.”
― Judy Blume
“It’s not unpatriotic to denounce an injustice committed on our behalf, perhaps it’s the most patriotic thing we can do.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
“It is the rare fortune of these days that one may think what one likes and say what one thinks.”
― Tacitus, Histories of Tacitus
“”Freedom is fundamentally the possibility of standig on a street corner and shouting “There is no freedom here!”
― Yoani Sánchez
“I wish there is a world where any one can know the truth and speak there mind with freedom without having to fear for their lives (Rinko, Basara, Vol. 13)”
― Yumi Tamura, Basara, Vol. 13
“The moment you say that any idea system is sacred, whether it’s a religious belief system or a secular ideology, the moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.” [Defend the right to be offended (openDemocracy, 7 February 2005)]”
― Salman Rushdie
“In the Hindu religion, one can[not] have freedom of speech. A Hindu must surrender his freedom of speech. He must act according to the Vedas. If the Vedas do not support the actions, instructions must be sought from the Smritis, and if the Smritis fail to provide any such instructions, he must follow in the footsteps of the great men.
He is not supposed to reason. Hence, so long as you are in the Hindu religion, you cannot expect to have freedom of thought”
― B.R. Ambedkar
“The framers of the constitution knew human nature as well as we do. They too had lived in dangerous days; they too knew the suffocating influence of orthodoxy and standardized thought. They weighed the compulsions for restrained speech and thought against the abuses of liberty. They chose liberty.” [Beauharnais v.Illinois, 342 U.S. 250, 287 (1952) (dissenting)]”
― William O. Douglas
“A desire for privacy does not imply shameful secrets; Moglen argues, again and again, that without anonymity in discourse, free speech is impossible, and hence also democracy. The right to speak the truth to power does not shield the speaker from the consequences of doing so; only comparable power or anonymity can do that.”
― Nick Harkaway, The Blind Giant
“Genuine bravery for a writer…. It is about calmly speaking the truth when everyone else is silenced, when the truth cannot be expressed. It is about speaking out with a different voice, risking the wrath of the state and offending everyone, for the sake of the truth, and the writer’s conscience.”
― Murong Xuecun
“When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe… that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas– that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment. As all life is an experiment. Every year if not every day we wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. ”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
“Actually, I am a coward. I say only what is safe to say, and I criticize only what is permissible to criticize.”
― Murong Xuecun
“It is not certain whether the effects of totalitarianism upon verse need be so deadly as its effects on prose. There is a whole series of converging reasons why it is somewhat easier for a poet than a prose writer to feel at home in an authoritarian society.[…]what the poet is saying- that is, what his poem “means” if translated into prose- is relatively unimportant, even to himself. The thought contained in a poem is always simple, and is no more the primary purpose of the poem than the anecdote is the primary purpose of the picture. A poem is an arrangement of sounds and associations, as a painting is an arrangement of brushmarks. For short snatches, indeed, as in the refrain of a song, poetry can even dispense with meaning altogether.”
― George Orwell, 50 Essays
“A constitution, as important as it is, will mean nothing unless the people are yearning for liberty and freedom.”
― U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
“If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.” [Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357 (1927)]”
― Louis D. Brandeis
“It is difficult to call myself a writer, even when I stand at a podium to receive a prize, I feel uncomfortable calling myself a writer—I am merely a word criminal.”
― Murong Xuecun
“The only truth is that we cannot speak the truth . The only acceptable viewpoint is that we cannot express a viewpoint.”
― Murong Xuecun
“Imagination sees the complete reality, – it is where past, present and future meet… Imagination is limited neither to the reality which is apparent – nor to one place. It lives everywhere. It is at a centre and feels the vibrations of all the circles within which east and west are virtually included. Imagination is the life of mental freedom. It realizes what everything is in its many aspects … Imagination does not uplift: we don’t want to be uplifted, we want to be more completely aware.”
― Kahlil Gibran
“If you can’t write freely and if you can’t speak freely in your country, you can be sure that you are living in a very primitive country!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan
“Unfortunately, I have dedicated great effort to the task of compiling this ‘sensitive words glossary,’ and I have mastered my filtering skills. I knew which words and sentences had to be cut, and I accepted the cutting as if that was the way it should be. In fact, I will often take it on myself to save time and cut a few words. I call this ‘castrated writing’ -—I am a proactive eunuch, I have already castrated myself before the surgeon raises his scalpel.”
― Murong Xuecun
“Confidence is knowing who you are and not changing it a bit because of someone’s version of your reality is not their reality.”
― Shannon L. Alder
“Why is contemporary China short of works that speak directly? Because we writers cannot speak directly, or rather we can only speak in an indirect way.
Why does contemporary China lack good works that critique our current situation? Because our current situation may not be critiqued. We have not only lost the right to criticise, but the courage to do so.
Why is modern China lacking in great writers? Because all the great writers are castrated while still in the nursery.”
― Murong Xuecun
“Because at this time, in this place, Chinese writing exhibits symptoms of a mental disorder.”
― Murong Xuecun
“You can’t expect someone to understand your journey, when they’ve hardly lived one of their own.”
― Nikki Rowe, Once a Girl, Now a Woman
—
The Founding Fathers Wanted Absolute Free Speech – Including on the Internet
May 28, 2014 Zero Hedge
The First Amendment to the Constitution provides:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
The powers-that-be argue that freedom of the press only applies to large, well-heeled corporate media. For example, the Nation noted last year:
When the Department of Justice rolled out new policies intended to “strengthen protections for members of the news media” this summer, it wasn’t clear who belonged to the “news media.” Other DOJ documents suggest a narrow application to professional, traditional journalists. (The DOJ did not return a request to clarify the agency’s definition of “news media.”) The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide excludes bloggers from the news media, along with “persons and entities that simply make information available,” like Wikileaks. These policies are guidelines, not directives, but as the Freedom of the Press Foundation points out, they are “part of a broader legislative effort in Washington to simultaneously offer protection for the press while narrowing the scope of who is afforded it.”
Senator Dianne Feinstein argued for an amendment that would have restricted the shield to salaried journalists. “Should this privilege apply to anyone, to a seventeen year-old who drops out of high school, buys a website for five dollars and starts a blog? Or should it apply to journalists, to reporters, who have bona fide credentials?”
(This is a silly distinction, given that many of the world’s top experts have their own blogs. And as the non-partisan First Amendment Center notes: “Traditional reporters now blog daily, and prominent bloggers show up in traditional media.”)
But the Free Speech and Free Press Clauses of the First Amendment don’t distinguish between media businesses and nonprofessional speakers (see this, this, this and this).
And the courts have ruled that the freedom of the press applies to everyone who disseminates information … not just giant corporate media companies who can afford to pay “salaries”.
For example, the United States Supreme Court has consistently refused to accord greater First Amendment protection to the institutional media than to other speakers:
In Branzburg v. Hayes (1972), the U.S. Supreme Court described freedom of the press as “a fundamental personal right” that is not confined to newspapers and periodicals
In Lovell v. City of Griffin (1938), the Chief Justice of the Supreme court defined “press” as “every sort of publication which affords a vehicle of information and opinion”
First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti (1978) rejected the “suggestion that communication by corporate members of the institutional press is entitled to greater constitutional protection than the same communication by” non-institutional-press businesses
In Bartnicki v. Vopper (2001), the court could “draw no distinction between the media respondents and” a non-institutional respondent
Earlier this year, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that a blogger is entitled to the same free speech protections as a traditional journalist and cannot be liable for defamation unless the blogger acted negligently. The Court held:
The protections of the First Amendment do not turn on whether the defendant was a trained journalist.
And the First Circuit agrees. As Gigaom reported in 2011:
One recent appeals court decision specifically referred to the fact that the ability to take photos, video and audio recordings with mobile devices has effectively made everyone a journalist — in practice, if not in name — and therefore deserving of protection.
In the decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, released just a few weeks ago, the judges pointed out that the First Amendment’s protection for freedom of the press “encompasses a range of conduct related to the gathering and dissemination of information,” and that citizens have the right to investigate government affairs and share what they learn with others. Judge Kermit Lipez also specifically noted that these protections don’t just apply to professional journalists. He said in his decision:
[C]hanges in technology and society have made the lines between private citizen and journalist exceedingly difficult to draw. The proliferation of electronic devices with video-recording capability means that many of our images of current events come from bystanders [and] and news stories are now just as likely to be broken by a blogger at her computer as a reporter at a major newspaper. Such developments make clear why the news-gathering protections of the First Amendment cannot turn on professional credentials or status.
The First Amendment Center correctly notes:
The purpose of the free press clause of the First Amendment was to keep an eye on people in power and maintain a check on corruption.
Supreme Court justices Black and Douglas explained in their concurring opinion in New York Times Co. v. United States (1971):
In the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people.
Indeed, the Founding Fathers made this clear even before the Revolutionary war started. Specifically, the Continental Congress – the legislative body of the Founding Fathers – wrote in 1774:
The last right we shall mention regards the freedom of the press. The importance of this consists, besides the advancement of truth, science, morality, and arts in general, in its diffusion of liberal sentiments on the administration of Government, its ready communication of thoughts between subjects, and its consequential promotion of union among them, whereby oppressive officers are shamed or intimidated into more honourable and just modes of conducting affairs.
These are the invaluable rights that form a considerable part of our mild system of government; that, sending its equitable energy through all ranks and classes of men, defends the poor from the rich, the weak from the powerful, the industrious from the rapacious, the peaceable from the violent, the tenants from the lords, and all from their superiors.
These are the rights without which a people cannot be free and happy, and under the protecting and encouraging influence of which these colonies have hitherto so amazingly flourished and increased. These are the rights a profligate Ministry are now striving by force of arms to ravish from us, and which we are with one mind resolved never to resign but with our lives.
In other words, the Founding Fathers understood that people who stand up to “oppressive” government officials are to be zealously protected … because “shaming” corrupt, powerful people “into more honourable and just modes of conducting affairs” is the only way to preserve liberty, justice and prosperity, and to remain “free and happy”.
Postscript: Unfortunately, the American government’s current treatment of the press is the exact opposite of what the Founding Fathers intended: persecution of real reporters who expose government corruption and support for government lapdogs and apologists.
http://www.dailystormer.com/the-founding-fathers-wanted-absolute-free-speech-including-on-the-internet/
—
Now watch this video and decide if they are trying to justify Speech suppression
End Of Free Speech If Democrats Have Their Way
Sen. Ted Cruz Objects to Democrats Attempt to Repeal Free Speech Protections
CHILLING FIRST AMENDMENT
“The Freedoms of Speech, Assembly, and of the Press are there to make sure we had a way to find out what was going on and could let other people know about it if the government ever got the idea not honor the Contract and give itself powers which we the people hadn’t consented to grant them.”…read more at
https://reclaimourrepublic.wordpress.com/2013/09/08/chilling-first-amendment/
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
– Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s propagandist
—
https://reclaimourrepublic.wordpress.com/2014/07/11/video-sen-ted-cruz-dems-want-the-power-to-ban-books-repeal-first-amendment/
https://reclaimourrepublic.wordpress.com/2014/09/11/video-sen-ted-cruz-vs-49-senate-democrats-who-voted-to-repeal-the-first-amendment-list-of-sponsors/
https://reclaimourrepublic.wordpress.com/2014/09/10/de-facto-repeal-of-the-first-amendment-trojan-horse-campaign-finance-reform-to-advance-dem-agenda/
Tagged: abortion, al-Qaida, “Muslim Mafia, benghazi, Caliphate, Chemical Weapons, Christian, collapse of America, Constitution, dictator, Ebola, foreclosure, Hamas, immigration, IRS, Islam, Islamist, Israel, jihad, Muslim Brotherhood, Nazi, NSA, Obama, obamacare, radical Islam, rights, Second Amendment, Syria, Tea Party, Tyrannical Government, voter fraud, White House