Dangerous Speech Quotes

#1. Censorship laws are blunt instruments, not sharp scalpels. Once enacted, they are easily misapplied to merely unpopular or only marginally dangerous speech.

Alan Dershowitz

#2. It condemned The Wave as a dangerous and mindless movement that suppressed freedom of speech and thought and ran against everything the country was founded on.

Todd Strasser

#3. Because I care about human beings, I want them to be free to do what is right for them. Isn't that more important than mere peace on earth? Isn't freedom, even dangerous freedom, preferable to the safest slavery, to peace bought with ignorance, cowardice, and submission?

CrimethInc.

#4. 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

#5. Rounding to the nearest cent is sufficiently accurate for practical purposes.

Alexander John Ellis

#6. I was brought up Catholic, and I felt the power of art from a very young age - seeing the brutality of all those images of flayed apostles and tortured saints was a pretty strong introduction.

Damien Hirst

#7. I said, "Where's all that delivering God's supposed to do?"
He snorted. "You're right, the only deliverance is the one we get for ourselves. The Lord doesn't have any hands and feet but ours."
"That doesn't say much for the Lord."
"It doesn't say much for us, either.

Sue Monk Kidd

#8. Nothing is more dangerous to maidenly delicacy of speech than the run of a good library.

Robertson Davies

#9. To protest free speech in the name of protecting women is dangerous and wrong.

Betty Friedan

#10. [...] identify influential writers and news sources (including those with strong biases) and monitor what they are saying. This can help you understand how groups talk about events and issues.

Rachel Hilary Brown

#11. This whole speech, extremely silly, tactless and probably politically dangerous, made Pavel Iosifovich shake with rage, but, strange as it might seem, it could be seen from the eyes of the crowd of customers that had gathered that it had aroused sympathy in very many people!

Mikhail Bulgakov

#12. I'm not a pretty princess, and I'm aware of that, so I like music that is really intense, really bold, and characters that in a way almost have a dark side and are kind of evil because, for me, that's when I feel my strongest and fiercest, when I'm not necessarily the good girl.

Ashley Wagner

#13. You wouldn't think there is anything life threatening about speech impediments, but let me tell you, there is nothing more dangerous than being a kid with a stutter and a lisp.

Sherman Alexie

#14. 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

#15. Our struggle is not easy. Those who oppose our cause are rich and powerful and they have many allies in high places. We are poor. Our allies are few. But we have something the rich do not own. We have our bodies and spirits and the justice of our cause as our weapons.

Cesar Chavez

#16. I speak this way because I know how perilous speech can be ... A saber might be stopped by a shield. A bullet might be dodged by a stroke of luck. But you can't dodge a word. If one is flung at you it will hit its mark unerringly. No Garritt there's nothing in the world more dangerous than talk.

Galen Beckett

#17. It was one of those dangerous moments when speech is at once sincere and deceptive - when feeling, rising high above its average depth, leaves flood-marks which are never reached again.

George Eliot

#18. The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.
[Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech]

John Steinbeck

#19. Negative words considered dangerous because it would hurt the child. Children will record clearly last words were spoken so that the child will be as pronounced. Moreover, speech is prayer, especially if it comes from the mouth of a mother.

Feel Cozy

#20. Opinions become dangerous to a state only when persecution makes it necessary for the people to communicate their ideas under the bond of secrecy.

Charles James Fox

#21. A rousing tale of techno-geek rebellion, as necessary and dangerous as file sharing, free speech, and bottled water on a plane.

Scott Westerfeld

#22. Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act.

Hannah Arendt

#23. The hushing of the criticism of honest opponents is a dangerous thing. It leads some of the best of the critics to unfortunate silence and paralysis of effort, and others to burst into speech so passionately and intemperately as to lose listeners.

W.E.B. Du Bois

#24. How rich are we that we can look on these worlds with the perspective of modern science ... that we do not have to wonder as did former men whether stars are jewels hanging from celestial drapery or peepholes in the astral skin of creation!

Guy Murchie

#25. Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted

H.L. Mencken

#26. I wonder now whether it isn't dangerous to assign significance to that which is essentially vacant, but we can't seem to avoid it. We cover up the holes with our speech, explaining away the emptiness until we forget it is there.

Siri Hustvedt

#27. Any technological advance can be dangerous. Fire was dangerous from the start, and so (even more so) was speech - and both are still dangerous to this day - but human beings would not be human without them.

Isaac Asimov

#28. He was untamed perfection.

Claire Contreras

#29. The literary gift is a very dangerous gift to possess if you are not telling the truth, and I would a great deal rather, for my part, have a man stumble in his speech than to feel he was so exceedingly smooth that he had better be watched both day and night.

Woodrow Wilson

#30. To be apt in quotation is a splendid and dangerous gift. Splendid, because it ornaments a man's speech with other men's jewels; dangerous, for the same reason.

Robertson Davies

#31. Hutu extremists were able to incite genocide in Rwanda in part because years of propaganda had influenced Hutus to view Tutsis as less than human and so dangerous that they must be eliminated from the country.

Rachel Hilary Brown

#32. More than ever at that instant did she long for speech - speech that would conceal and protect where dangerous silence might betray.

L.M. Montgomery

#33. Juno MacGuff: Wise move. I know this girl who had a huge crazy freakout because she took too many behavioral meds at once. She took off all her clothes and jumped into the fountain at Ridgedale Mall and she was like, "Blaaaaah! I'm a kraken from the sea!"
Su-Chin: That was you.

Diablo Cody