Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

“If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”

“In the long run, an open airing of discriminatory ideas, and an ensuing debate about them, may well be more effective in curbing them than censorship would be.”

“[A]fter [a] panel discussion [at a prestigious law school], person after person got up, including some of the younger professors, to assert that their goals of social justice for blacks, for women, for minorities of all kinds were incompatible with free speech and that free speech was an antagonist. . . . [W]hen I came to the ACLU, my major passion was social justice, particularly racial justice. But my experience was that free speech wasn't an antagonist. It was an ally. It was a critical ally. – 2020 interview (Photo Courtesy of "Mighty Ira")

“Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.”

“The purpose of college is not just... to transmit skills. It’s also to widen your horizons, to make you a better citizen, to help you to evaluate information, to help you make your way through the world, to help you be more creative. The way to do that is to create a space where a lot of ideas are presented and collide, and people are having arguments, and people are testing each others’ theories... and over time, people learn from each other because they’re getting out of their own narrow point of view and having a broader point of view... When I went to college, suddenly there were some folks who didn’t think at all like me... And sometimes their views would be infuriating to me. But it was because there was this space where you could interact with people who didn’t agree with you, and had different backgrounds than you, that I then started testing my own assumptions. And sometimes I changed my mind...

" ...Sometimes I realized, you know what, maybe I’ve been too narrow minded. Maybe I didn’t take this into account. Maybe I should see this person’s perspective... I’ve heard of some college campuses where they don’t want to have a guest speaker who, you know, is too conservative, or they don’t want to read a book that has language that is offensive to African-Americans, or somehow sends a demeaning signal towards women. And you know, I’ve got to tell you, I don’t agree with that either. I don’t agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of view.” - September, 2015

“What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.” – 1990

“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.” – first amendment

“[A]cademic freedom... is of transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned. That freedom is therefore a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom... The classroom is peculiarly the marketplace of ideas. The Nation's future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to that robust exchange of ideas which discovers truth out of a multitude of tongues, [rather] than through any kind of authoritative selection.” – Keyishian v. Board of Regents (1967)

“Without freedom of speech and the right to dissent,
the civil rights movement would have
been a bird without wings.” – 2017

“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... [E]very age [has] held many opinions which subsequent ages have deemed not only false but absurd; and... many opinions, now general, will be rejected by future ages.” – On Freedom, 1859

"The right to criticize; the right to hold unpopular beliefs; the right to protest; the right of independent thought. The exercise of these rights should not cost one single American citizen his reputation or his right to a livelihood nor should he be in danger of losing his reputation or livelihood merely because he happens to know someone who holds unpopular beliefs. Who of us doesn’t? Otherwise none of us could call our souls our own. Otherwise thought control would have set in." – 1950 speech against McCarthyism

“Punishing evil or bad thoughts amounts to thought control, which is the quintessential First Amendment sin and a hallmark of an authoritarian or totalitarian state. It is no accident that polities that coerce their vision of a new and perfect form of human nature end up erecting their own versions of gulags.” – 2020

"Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thought and opinions has ceased to exist." – 1860

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right
to tell people what they do not want
to hear.” – 1945; Preface to Animal Farm

“I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." – 1788 speech

“The First Amendment means that government has no power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas,
its subject matter, or its content.”
– Police Dept. of City of Chicago v. Mosley (1972)