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“Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.” - Benjamin Franklin
“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.” – Donald Downs 2020
"Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thought and opinions has ceased to exist." – Frederick Douglass 1860
“No right was deemed by the fathers of the Government more sacred than the right of speech. . . the great moral renovator of society and government. . . . Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thought 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.” – Frederick Douglass 1860 speech
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” – George Orwell 1945; Preface to Animal Farm
“If someone wants to see and experience the world as it ‘really’ is, he can do so only by understanding it as something that is shared by many people, lies between them, separates them, showing itself differently to each and comprehensible only to the extent that many people can talk about it and exchange their opinions and perspectives with one another, over against one another. Only in the freedom of our speaking with one another does the world, as that about which we speak, emerge in its objectivity and visibility from all sides.” - Hannah Arendt The Promise of Politics, written in latter half of 1950s
“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 1954
“[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. – Ira Glasser 2020 interview (Photo Courtesy of "Mighty Ira")
“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." – James Madison 1788 speech
“Without freedom of speech and the right to dissent, the civil rights movement would have been a bird without wings.” – John Lewis 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.” – John Stuart Mill On Freedom, 1859
“History shows that the more open the intellectual environment, the better minorities will do.... [G]ay people know we owe our progress to freedom of speech and freedom of thought.... The best society for minorities is not the society that protects minorities from speech but the one that protects speech from minorities (and from majorities, too).” – Jonathan Rauch 2013
“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." – concurring opinion in Whitney v. California, Justice Louis Brandeis 1927
“[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.” – Justice William Brennan Keyishian v. Board of Regents (1967)
"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." – Margaret Chase Smith 1950 speech against McCarthyism
" ...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.” - Barack Obama September, 2015
“History shows that the more open the intellectual environment, the better minorities will do.... [G]ay people know we owe our progress to freedom of speech and freedom of thought.... The best society for minorities is not the society that protects minorities from speech but
the one that protects speech from minorities
(and from majorities, too).” – Jonathan Rauch 2013
"A constitution, as important as it is, will mean nothing unless the people are yearning for liberty and freedom.” – Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg 2012 interview
“What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.” – Salman Rushdie 1990
“The First Amendment means that government has no power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter, or its content.” – Thurgood Marshall Police Dept. of City of Chicago v. Mosley (1972)
“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.” – United States Constitution first amendment
"Courage in the public sphere means that one is to go against majority opinion (at the same time risking losing one's position) in the name of the truth." – Václav Havel 2000
“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..." - Barack Obama
