Top 88 Quotes About A Free Press
#1. Paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.
Hugo Black
#2. The only time you have a free press is when you own one.
H.L. Mencken
#4. Perhaps the best thing which can be said about newspapers in the United States is that they are in chronic disagreement with each other. That is what is meant by a free press.
Jim Bishop
#5. A free press stands as one of the great interpreters between the government and the people. To allow it to be fettered is to fetter ourselves.
George Sutherland
#6. Without a free press there can be no free society. That is axiomatic. However, freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of a free society. The scope and nature of the constitutional guarantee of the freedom of the press are to be viewed and applied in that light.
Felix Frankfurter
#7. Of all the many and (thanks to a free press) the ever-multiplying blessings attendant upon the "glorious constitution" of literature, not the least precious and profitable to a modern cultivator of systems and syllables, in pamphlets, magazines, and folios, is the right of Quotation.
Samuel Laman Blanchard
#8. We have to uphold a free press and freedom of speech
because, in the end, lies and misinformation are no match for the truth.
Barack Obama
#9. It is almost superfluous to say that there is no such thing as a free and independent press among the mainstream news media today. In fact, the major media more resembles a propaganda machine than it does a free press.
Chuck Baldwin
#10. The second is the damage to the credibility and independence of a free press which may be caused by covert relationships with the U.S. journalists and media organizations.
Frank Church
#11. A free press doesn't mean it's not a tame press.
Andrew Vachss
#12. A free press needs to be a respected press.
Tom Stoppard
#13. What I'm thinking about more and more these days is simply the importance of transparency, and Jefferson's saying that he'd rather have a free press without a government than a government without a free press.
Esther Dyson
#14. One of the unsung freedoms that go with a free press is the freedom not to read it.
Ferdinand Mount
#15. We look forward to analyzing and working with legislation that will make - it would hope - put a free press's mind at ease that you're not being denied information you shouldn't see.
George W. Bush
#16. The rise to prominence of the Saudi novel in Arabic is the great man-bites-dog of recent world literature. Saudi Arabia is a country without a free press, where European styles and forms are distrusted and where the female half of the population became literate only in this generation.
James Buchan
#17. In Britian we have a free press. It's not a pretty press, but it's free. The people who can't bear the Daily Mail, they say: 'you should ban it'. No no, no no, you don't ban it ... you don't buy it.
Ian Hislop
#19. We talk about a free press. These people hide, they make a lot of money off the media. They hide behind the slogans of free press, and then they can come out with crap like that. It's just garbage. It's insulting to the readers.
Robert Scheer
#20. Grant me thirty years of equal division of inheritances and a free press, and I will provide you with a republic.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#21. A free press is the greatest guarantee of a free society. We must keep it alive. We have to tolerate obnoxious opinions. But I don't want only opinions. I want facts.
Anthony S. Pitch
#22. A people that wants to be free must arm itself with a free press.
George Seldes
#23. Israel is a democratic state with an independent judiciary, a free press and a diverse population of many cultures, religions and creeds.
Jonathan Sacks
#24. Free thought, free speech and a free press.
Anne Royall
#25. Free speech exercised both individually and through a free press, is a necessity in any country where people are themselves free.
Theodore Roosevelt
#26. A free press is equally free to print the truth or ignore it, as it chooses.
T.R. Fehrenbach
#27. Press freedom does not mean that the press should be above the law. While it's vital that a free press can tell truth to power, it is equally important that those in power can tell truth to the press.
David Cameron
#28. The first thing dictators do is finish free press, to establish censorship. There is no doubt that a free press is the first enemy of dictatorship.
Fidel Castro
#29. I am quite excited that Moi is leaving. Kenyans have changed. We have a free press, and it is no longer a situation of 'follow in my footsteps.'
Binyavanga Wainaina
#30. [N]o democracy with a free press has ever experienced a major famine.
Amartya Sen
#31. There is nothing so fretting and vexatious, nothing so justly terrible to tyrants, and their tools and abettors, as a free press.
Samuel
#32. A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.
Albert Camus
#33. The crisis of modern democracy is a profound one. Free elections, a free press and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market has reduced them to commodities available on sale to the highest bidder.
Arundhati Roy
#34. Britain is still seen as a beacon for decency, for democracy, for vigorous judges upholding the rule of law and, dare I say it, a free press. I respect the press in theory, but when you see some of the things it writes about you, it's not exactly a happy relationship.
Cherie Blair
#35. So this guy, Jeff Johnson, who is an accountant who cares nothing at all about a free press and cares nothing about journalism, he's a right winger who supported the war, you know, who two years ago told people he couldn't stand a word that I wrote.
Robert Scheer
#36. The government and the people are under a moral necessity of acting together; a free press compels them to bend to one another.
James Mill
#37. No matter how imperfect things are, if you've got a free press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable.
Tom Stoppard
#38. The purpose of a free press, in which I believe believe it or not, is so that people can make rational decisions in a democracy. They'd already perverted the process so bad that was hard, but the point is valid.
John Ringo
#39. Regardless of all of the ways that the media have changed in recent years, one thing that will never go out of style in America is the ability of a free press to keep the public accurately and honestly informed about its government.
Candice S. Miller
#40. To watch the progress of such endeavors is the office of a free press. To give us early alarm and put us on our guard against encroachments of power. This then is a right of utmost importance, one for which, instead of yielding it up, we ought rather to spill our blood.
Alexander Hamilton
#41. You want a culture where citizens are free to express themselves and so live in the openness necessary to the functioning of a successful economy? Israel has a free press, much of it openly hostile to the parties in power.
John Podhoretz
#42. Millions like me in Russia want a free press, the rule of law, social justice, and free and fair elections. My new job is to fight for those people and to fight for these fundamental rights.
Garry Kasparov
#43. Virtually all the trends that matter are making a mockery of the industry's ritual incantations about the values and virtues of a free press in a free society.
Hodding Carter III
#44. A managed democracy is a wonderful thing ... for the managers ... and its greatest strength is a 'free press' when 'free' is defined as 'responsible' and the managers define what is 'irresponsible'.
Robert A. Heinlein
#45. A free press can only exist where there is private control over the means of production
Ludwig Von Mises
#46. A free press is one that prints a dictator's speech but doesn't have to.
Laurence J. Peter
#47. As someone who is in awe and grateful every day to be in a country where freedom of the press, free speech and free elections are a way of life, I am wowed, amazed and excited by the opportunity to moderate a 2012 presidential debate.
Candy Crowley
#48. The quintessential exercise of free speech in a culture supposedly built on that concept and dedicated to it, the Internet's development is as historically important to humanity perhaps even more so as Gutenberg 's invention of the printing press.
L. Neil Smith
#49. Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets..
Napoleon Bonaparte
#50. I get a little nauseated, perhaps, when I hear the phrase 'freedom of the press' used as freely as it is, knowing that a large part of our proprietorial press is not free at all.
Harold Wilson
#51. The notion that the church, the press, and the universities should serve the state is essentially a Communist notion. In a free society these institutions must be wholly free - which is to say that their function is to serve as checks upon the state.
Alan Barth
#52. Every free man has a right to the use of the press, so he has to the use of his arms.
Tench Coxe
#53. As unbalanced parties of every description can never tolerate a free inquiry of any kind, when employed against themselves, the license, and even the most temperate freedom of the press, soon excite resentment and revenge.
John Adams
#54. A free and independent press is generally considered essential for democracy, both to raise timely questions about debatable government policies and to report challenges to those policies when they fail.
W. Lance Bennett
#55. In 2007, when I was a lawyer for the public interest group Free Press, I helped draft the complaint to the FCC against Comcast for secretly blocking BitTorrent and other technologies.
Marvin Ammori
#56. Freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of achieving a free society.
Felix Frankfurter
#57. Fear is a prison in which we place ourselves. You need only to press against the bars to realize that the door is always unlocked, and you are always free to leave.
Luna DeMasi
#58. The Iraqi Free Press, which did not exist 18 months ago because there was no such thing as the Iraqi Free Press, broke a story about the U.N. Oil-for-Food scandal, which could potentially turn out to be the largest scandal in history.
Chris Chocola
#59. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.
Hugo Black
#60. You hear about constitutional rights, free speech and the free press. Every time I hear these words I say to myself, 'That man is a Red, that man is a Communist!' You never hear a real American talk like that.
Frank Hague
#61. No substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press.
Amartya Sen
#62. No one needs to tell me about the importance of the free press in a democratic society or about the essential role a newspaper can play in its community.
Robert Kennedy
#63. I believe in a real democratic system, with a state of law and freedom of the press. I believe in a free, open-market economy integrated with the world. And I believe in equality of opportunity. Those are my basic beliefs. On top of that, of course, I believe in some moral values.
Sebastian Pinera
#64. One of my beliefs very strongly is that any democracy depends on a free, healthy press.
Steve Jobs
#65. We must eliminate all newspapers; we cannot make a revolution with free press. Newspapers are instruments of the oligarchy.
Ernesto Che Guevara
#66. The government can't create jobs; they'll destroy jobs trying to do it. The government doesn't have any money; all they have is a printing press. We need to free markets to create jobs; if the government wants to help, they should reduce their burden on the economy.
Peter Schiff
#67. There is no more important struggle for American democracy than ensuring a diverse, independent and free media. Free Press is at the heart of that struggle.
Bill Moyers
#68. 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.
U.S. Congress
#69. Try to be pleasant to one another, get plenty of fresh air, read a good book now and then, depose your government when it suspends the free press, try to use the mechanism of the state to adjudicate fairly and employ diplomatic means wherever possible to avoid armed conflict.
Jasper Fforde
#70. Montrose decided then and there that a full library, one made of old-fashioned paper books with bindings, the kind that cannot be electronically re-edited by anonymous lines of hidden code, was just as much a necessity for a free man as a shooting iron or a printing press.
John C. Wright
#71. A free, analytical and questioning press must be helped survive.
Xavier Niel
#72. Well. You have a secret from me," he said in the end. "No, don't turn away from me. Did you think I would try to press or conjure it out of you? Never that. Friends must be free. My tormenting you to find it would build a worse barrier between us than your hiding it.
C.S. Lewis
#73. 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
#74. When you surround an army, leave an outlet free. Do not press a desperate foe too hard.
Sun Tzu
#75. As the sweaty, alcohol fuming bodies press in on me from all directions I decide that my ideal of a good time is reading a good novel, alone
Rita Stradling
#76. One of the great joys of life, now that you can afford a nice suit, is getting one for free. That's why I like to do press tours - I always say making movies is just an excuse to get free clothing.
Eli Roth
#77. There is an attempt to tarnish Turkey by using press freedom when it is in fact measures taken against terrorism, i dispute this. Nowhere in Europe or in other countries is there a media that is as free as the press in Turkey.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan
#78. A free and truly independent press - fiercely independent when necessary - is the red beating heart of freedom and democracy.
Dan Rather
#79. As a conservative who believes in limited government, I believe that the only check on government power in real time is a free and independent press.
Mike Pence
#80. I cannot overemphasise the value we place on a free, independent and outspoken press
Nelson Mandela
#81. The press doesn't stop publishing, by the way, in a fascist escalation; it simply watches what it says. That too can be an incremental process, and the pace at which the free press polices itself depends on how journalists are targeted.
Naomi Wolf
#82. Now personally, I think the president should golf every day and never have a press conference. I want the leader of the free world to be as stress-free as possible. And if golf helps fade the psychic heat from the job, by all means tee it up often, Mr. President.
Mark McKinnon
#83. For a lot of people, when something happens that gives them 15 minutes of fame, they try to create something new out of that. I was really fortunate. For a professional speaker, it is all about press, publicity and PR, so to get that much free publicity ... it made life a lot easier.
Judson Laipply
#84. Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element.
Rosa Luxemburg
#85. It is very difficult to have a free, fair and honest press anywhere in the world. In the first place, as a rule, papers are largely supported by advertising, and that immediately gives the advertisers a certain hold over the medium they use.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#86. Would you like Fox's right to free press put up to a vote and say: "Well, if five states have approved it, let's wait till the other 45 states do."?
Ted Olson
#87. 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
#88. Although I may find the type of programming seen during the 2004 Super Bowl and the 2003 Golden Globe Awards disgusting and disturbing, we must always work hard to defend the cherished freedoms so clearly outlined in our Constitution, including a healthy and free press.
Mike Rogers
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