First Amendment Rights Quotes

#1. I want to regain my First Amendment rights.

Laura Schlessinger

#2. Whether children have first amendment rights is a vexed legal question, but what is not in question is that they someday will. Constraining them from expressing their views is no preparation for exercising those rights.

Crispin Sartwell

#3. It just seems to be a human trait to want to protect the speech of people with whom we agree. For the First Amendment, that is not good enough. So it is really important that we protect First Amendment rights of people no matter what side of the line they are on.

Floyd Abrams

#4. You're suppressing my first amendment rights," she said, voice muffled. "You don't live in America; you live in the United States of Teague.

Lauren Gilley

#5. A campaign ought to demonstrate the basic human decency of the candidate. That means your First Amendment rights end at the tip of your opponent's nose - even in the matter of political rhetoric.

Mike Pence

#6. The US constitution's First Amendment rights only cover Americans, but I believe that in a democracy the competition of ideas and free speech should combat beliefs that it does not agree with - more speech and debate, not censorship.

Joichi Ito

#7. It's never a good thing to see a government agency talk in secret about the need to 'control protestors' - especially when that agency is charged with protecting the homeland against terrorists, not nonviolent demonstrators exercising their First Amendment rights to peaceable dissent.

Michael Hastings

#8. In my view, a corporation is not a person. A corporation does not have First Amendment rights to spend as much money as it wants, without disclosure, on a political campaign.

Bernie Sanders

#9. I would sign an executive order protecting religious liberty, our first amendment rights, so Christian business owners and individuals don't face discrimination for having a traditional view of marriage.

Bobby Jindal

#10. Only in America - the land of the free - can an innocent person be forced to plead the Fifth for exercising their First Amendment rights. Say what you want, but you better shut your fucking pie hole if it offends someone's delicate sensibilities.

Kendall Grey

#11. [Asserting] important First Amendment rights ... why should [executions] be the one area that is conducted behind closed doors? ... Why shouldn't executions be public?

Phil Donahue

#12. And so popular culture raises issues that are very important, actually, in the country I think. You get issues of the First Amendment rights and issues of drug use, issues of AIDS, and things like that all arise naturally out of pop culture.

Kurt Loder

#13. The First Amendment applies to rogues and scoundrels. You don't lose your First Amendment rights because of a sleazy personality, or even for having committed a crime. Felons in jail are protected by the First Amendment.

Naomi Wolf

#14. I urge the citizens of Ferguson who have been peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights to join with law enforcement in condemning the actions of looters, vandals and others seeking to inflame tensions and sow discord.

Eric Holder

#15. So the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is out there preserving and fighting for, and sometimes winning and sometimes losing, the fight for First Amendment rights in comics and, more generally, for freedom of speech.

Neil Gaiman

#16. The government argues that First Amendment rights are outweighed by the need to prosecute those who transmit classified information and documents.

Noam Chomsky

#17. I had my first amendment rights removed by a USA judge for a video that I recorded in the public sidewalk. The right to free speech and freedom of the press only partially exists in the USA.

Steven Magee

#18. It does not help when an administration, in response to American attacks on American soil and American individuals, the administration ends up asking Americans to give up their First Amendment rights for which our service members are fighting.

Louie Gohmert

#19. In 'Citizens United v. FEC', the Supreme Court ruled that sections of the federal campaign finance law known as McCain-Feingold imposed unconstitutional restrictions on the First Amendment rights of corporations.

Eric Schneiderman

#20. I try to do that in this book without preaching - to try to do as you just said that you really have to defend the First Amendment rights of everybody.

Floyd Abrams

#21. First, the firearms industry has been around and has been respected for generations. They provide a valuable service and a highly desirable product to millions of sportsmen and supporters of those second amendment rights.

Cliff Stearns

#22. The way liberals are interpreting the First Amendment today is that it prevents anyone who is religious from being in government.

Rush Limbaugh

#23. TV pollutes our minds and dulls our senses. It is a babysitter that molests children. And yet those who are on the television scream "first amendment" and "freedom of speech". How is corporate control freedom of speech? And what rights did our forefathers grant corporations, anyway?

James Rozoff

#24. Every man - in the development of his own personality - has the right to form his own beliefs and opinions. Hence, suppression of belief, opinion and expression is an affront to the dignity of man, a negation of man's essential nature.
[Toward a General Theory of the First Amendment (1963)]

Thomas I. Emerson

#25. First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully.

John Yoo

#26. Under the privilege of the First Amendment many, many ridiculous things are said.

John Kenneth Galbraith

#27. The First Amendment is important not only to guarantee the rights of alternative religions and of nonreligious persons in society; it is also important in setting the only possible legal and social condition for the creative health of serious religion itself.

Langdon Brown Gilkey

#28. The First Amendment freedom of religion is as important today as when the Bill of Rights was first written.

Arlen Specter

#29. An unconditional right to say what one pleases about public affairs is what I consider to be the minimum guarantee of the First Amendment.

Hugo Black

#30. I cannot believe that Muffy just called the First Amendment fiddle-faddle. Fiddle Faddle is a delicious candy-coated popcorn snack food. It has nothing to do with the Bill of Rights.

Meg Cabot

#31. However, they ignore the fact that the First Amendment is intended to protect only against government sanctions for exercising free speech rights, not private actions.

Ed Koch

#32. The next year, the Court decided what is generally viewed as the major case of the early years. The decision, Chisholm v. Georgia (1793), provoked an immediate backlash, in the form of the first constitutional amendment to be ratified after the ten amendments of the Bill of Rights.

Linda Greenhouse

#33. The First Amendment does not guarantee the press a constitutional right of special access to information not available to the general public, nor does it cloak the inmate with special rights of freedom of speech.

Pete Wilson

#34. For the first 200 years of our nation's history, corporations were never defined by the courts as persons with free speech rights under the First Amendment. Only in recent years have we witnessed this corporate takeover of our First Amendment, culminating in the Citizens United ruling.

John Bonifaz

#35. Our democracy depends on an informed citizenry to survive, Your Honor. Besides the advancement of truth, science and morality in general, the freedom of the press is a backbone of democracy. It exists to keep the government transparent, and the human instruments of government honest.

Kenneth Eade

#36. It's freedom of speech, not freedom from consequences and/or ridicule.

A.E. Samaan

#37. It is the press, above all, which wages a positively fanatical and slanderous struggle, tearing down everything which can be regarded as a support of national independence, cultural elevation, and the economic independence of the nation.

Adolf Hitler

#38. Regulated" rights are not rights. They are niceties and platitudes intended to keep the populace thinking their individual autonomy is respected by their government.

A.E. Samaan

#39. Just as the First and Fourth Amendment secure individual rights of speech and security respectively, the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. This view of the text comports with the all but unanimous understanding of the Founding Fathers.

John Ashcroft