Free Speech Quotes - Page 22

• The FBI wanted us to introduce the 1994 Digital Telephony bill today and I said absolutely not. They have to understand they have a Vermonter as the Chairman Of the Technology and Law committee and that we Vermonters respect our privacy.

  Patrick Leahy

  Technology, Law, Bills

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• There are no bad haircuts in cyberspace.

  Dave Barry

  Cyberspace, Internet, Bad Haircuts

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• In Turkey it was always 1952, in Malaysia 1937; Afghanistan was 1910 and Bolivia 1949. It is 20 years ago in the Soviet Union, 10 in Norway, five in France. It is always last year in Australia and next week in Japan.

  Paul Theroux

  Japan, Next Week, Years

  Paul Theroux (2012). “The Lower River”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Our fear of technology is really a fear of empowerment. We now have the ability to design the reality we live in, and we have to step up to the occasion.

  Douglas Rushkoff

  Technology, Reality, Design

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• There happened in the Middle Ages what has happened so often since then. Those who were the beneficiaries of the established order were bent on defending it, not so much, perhaps, because it guaranteed their interests, as because it seemed to them indispensable to the preservation of society.

  Henri Pirenne

  Order, Age, Internet

  Henri Pirenne (1956). “Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade”, p.169, Princeton University Press

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• The State insists that, by thus quarantining the general reading public against books not too rugged for grown men and women in order to shield juvenile innocence, it is exercising its power to promote the general welfare. Surely this is to burn the house to roast the pig...The incidence of this enactment is to reduce the adult population of Michigan to reading only what is fit for children.

  Felix Frankfurter

  Children, Book, Reading

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• People think I watch TV too much, but they are wrong. There is a huge difference between merely "watching" TV and learning to respond aggressively to it. The difference, for most people, is the difference between the living and dying of their own brains.

  Hunter S. Thompson

  Thinking, Differences, People

  Hunter S. Thompson (2012). “Better Than Sex”, p.52, Pan Macmillan

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• I should say here, because some in Washington like to dream up ways to control the Internet, that we don't need to 'control' free speech, we need to control ourselves.

  Peggy Noonan

  Dream, Needs, Speech

  Peggy Noonan (2008). “Patriotic Grace: What It Is and Why We Need It Now”, Harper

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• My belief in free speech is so profound that I am seldom tempted to deny it to the other fellow. Nor do I make any effort to differentiate between the other fellow right and that other fellow wrong, for I am convinced that free speech is worth nothing unless it includes a full franchise to be foolish and even...malicious.

  H. L. Mencken

  Profound, Effort, Speech

  H.L. Mencken (2011). “My Life as Author and Editor”, p.29, Vintage

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• Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Democracies Have, Government, Democracy

  Parliament of Whores (1991)

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• New and stirring things are belittled because if they are not belittled the humiliating question arises 'Why then are you not taking part in them?

  H. G. Wells

  Science, Internet, Arise

  H. G. Wells (2015). “Delphi Complete Works of H. G. Wells”, p.7624, Delphi Classics

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• Will his work survive? Alas, I worry that it will not. As an American liberal with impeccable credentials, I would like to say that political correctness is going to kill American liberalism if it is not fought to the death by people like me for the dangers it represents to free speech, to the exchange of ideas, to openheartedness, or to the spirit of art itself. Political correctness has a stranglehold on academia, on feminism, and on the media. It is a form of both madness and maggotry, and has already silenced the voices of writers like James Dicky across the land.

  Pat Conroy

  Art, Media, Land

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• He also said that if anyone did anything to mess up the rest of the testing, he was going to call 911 personally. Yeah, like that wouldn't make it into the nightly news again: WHEELCHAIR-BOUND CANCER PATIENT ARRESTED FOR FREE SPEECH.

  Jordan Sonnenblick

  Cancer, News, Speech

  Jordan Sonnenblick (2012). “After Ever After”, p.102, Scholastic Inc.

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• Ares always reemerges from the chaos. It will never go away. Athenian civilization defends itself from the forces of Ares with metis, or technology. Technology is built on science. Science is like the alchemists' uroburos, continually eating its own tail. The process of science doesn't work unless young scientists have the freedom to attack and tear down old dogmas, to engage in an ongoing Titanomachia. Science flourishes where art and free speech flourish.

  Neal Stephenson

  Art, Technology, Civilization

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• Nobody is capable of of free speech unless he knows how to use language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to learned and worked at.

  Northrop Frye

  Use, Speech, Language

  "The Educated Imagination (Talk 6: The Vocation of Eloquence)". Book by Northrop Frye, 1963.

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• Men must fumble awhile with error to separate it from truth, I think- as long as they don't seize the error hungrily because it has a pleasanter taste.

  Walter M. Miller, Jr.

  Men, Thinking, Errors

  Walter M. Miller Jr. (1959). “A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ”

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• Every time I criticize what I consider to be excesses or faults in the news business, I am accused of repression; and the leaders of the various media professional groups wave the First Amendment as they denounce me. That happens to be my amendment too. It guarantees my free speech as much as it does their freedom of the press.

  Spiro T. Agnew

  Views, Media, Leader

  "The Impudent Snobs: Agnew Vs. the Intellectual Establishment".

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• Free speech is meaningless unless it tolerates the speech that we hate.

  Henry Hyde

  Hate, Liberty, Speech

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• The first amendment protects free speech, but if you don't have freedom of thought, do you really have freedom of speech?

  Rob Kampia

  Freedom Of Speech, Firsts, First Amendment

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• It is amazing how many people act as if the right to free speech includes the right to be free of criticism for what you say - which means that other people should not have the same right to free speech that they claim for themselves.

  Thomas Sowell

  Mean, People, Criticism

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• Free Speech in the College Community is a very timely book written by a dedicated scholar of the First Amendment. Challenging and readable it should be studied by all academicians, students, legislators and lawyers.

  Nancy Kassebaum

  Book, College, Community

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• I prefer a little free speech to no free speech at all; but how many have free speech or the chance or the mind for it; and is not free speech here as elsewhere clamped down on in ratio of its freedom and danger?

  James Agee

  Mind, Speech, Littles

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• Free speech isn't dead in Germany and Italy, merely the speakers.

  Bob Hope

  Funny, Humorous, Italian

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• Twitter is a form of free speech, and I'm all for that. But if Cee Lo Green, a maverick of sorts, can't get on Twitter and say something outlandish or outrageous, then what is the whole point of Twitter at all?

  Cee Lo Green

  Speech, Green, Form

  "Cee Lo Green Is Fking Outrageous". Interview with Eric Spitznagel, www.esquire.com. February 5, 2012.

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• You see these dictators up on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. They're afraid of words and thought. ... They make frantic efforts to bar our thoughts and words. ... A state of society where men may not speak their mind - where children denounce their parents to the police - where a businessman or small shopkeeper ruins his competitor by telling tales about his private opinion. Such a state of society cannot long endure if it is continually in contact with the healthy outside world.

  Winston Churchill

  Children, Men, Long

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