Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. They know its power.
I have always been among those who believed that the greatest freedom of speech was the greatest safety, because if a man is a fool, the best thing to do is to encourage him to advertise the fact by speaking. It cannot be so easily discovered if you allow him to remain silent and look wise, but if you let him speak, the secret is out.
Free speech is not speech you agree with, uttered by someone you admire. It’s speech that you find stupid, selfish, dangerous, uninformed, or threatening, spoken and sponsored by someone you despise, fear, or ridicule. . . . It reflects a tolerance for differences. If everyone agreed on all things, we wouldn’t need it.
The greatest right in the world is the right to be wrong. . . . No person or set of persons can properly establish a standard of expression for others.
It is necessary for the welfare of society that genius should be privileged to utter sedition, to blaspheme, to outrage good taste, to corrupt the youthful mind, and, generally, to scandalize its uncles.
I dare you. Try to take away my freedom of expression. I’m a journalist. A free-speech warrior. I serve in the Army of the First Amendment. I didn’t take this job for the bad money and the regressive health care coverage. I’m here for the truth, the sunshine, the casting open of closed doors!
They taught me that the truth would make me free but failed to warn me of the kind of trouble I’d get into by trying to tell it—I remain duly grateful.
It is never my custom to use words lightly. If twenty-seven years in prison have done anything to us, it was to use the silence of solitude to make us understand how precious words are and how real speech is in its impact upon the way people live and die.
To whom do you award the right to decide which speech is harmful, or who is the harmful speaker? Or to determine in advance what are the harmful consequences going to be that we know enough about in advance to prevent? To whom would you give this job?
Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it.
Reprehensible ideas don’t disappear if you make them illegal. By driving them under the carpet you might feed them, or make them taboo. . . . I’d rather know the racist in the room.
My desire to curtail undue freedom of speech extends only to such public arenas as restaurants, airports, streets, hotel lobbies, parks, and department stores. Verbal exchanges between consenting adults in private are of as little interest to me as they probably are to them.
We all think our own speech rights are the ones that count, and our neighbors’ rights a little less so.
Laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man may present his views without penalty, there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population.
We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.
It is perhaps the great discomfort of those trying to silence the world to discover that we have voices sealed inside our heads, voices that, with each passing day, grow even louder than the clamor of the world outside.
Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.
