Top 100 Quotes About First Amendment
#1. The relevant part of the First Amendment here prohibits the making of any law, quote, "abridging the freedom of speech." And it's pretty well-established that speech comes in many forms.
Laura Sydell
#2. After the church ceased to exist, an outfit calling itself the First Amendment Protection Society, Inc. - the largest operator of adult bookstores, topless bars, Internet porn sites, and karaoke cocktail lounges in the United States - intimidated
Dean Koontz
#3. Just as the strength of the Internet is chaos, so the strength of our liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of the unfettered speech the First Amendment protects.
Stewart Dalzell
#4. They're Democrats always accusing us of repressing their speech. I say let's do it. Let's repress them. Frankly, I'm not a big fan of the First Amendment.
Ann Coulter
#5. I'm a crusader. I really believe in the First Amendment, and I use it fully, and I pay a price for that.
Al Goldstein
#6. The First Amendment ... begins with the five loveliest words in the English language: 'Congress shall make no law'.
George Will
#7. The Supreme Court is expected to rule this week whether banning cross burning by groups like the Klu Klux Klan violates the first amendment. The outcome could affect the entertainment at Trent Lott's Christmas party.
Tina Fey
#8. Somewhere along the line we started misinterpreting the First Amendment and this idea of the freedom of speech the amendment grants us. We are free to speak as we choose without fear of prosecution or persecution, but we are not free to speak as we choose without consequence.
Roxane Gay
#9. Evolutionism is a religious world view that is not supported by science, Scripture, popular opinion, or common sense. The exclusive teaching of this dangerous, mind-altering philosophy in tax supported schools, parks, museums, etc. is a clear violation of the First Amendment.
Kent Hovind
#10. The point is that knowledge of God is not prohibited under the First Amendment.
Roy Moore
#11. 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
#12. The First Amendment isn't about free thought and free opinion and free belief. The First Amendment is about free exercise
the carrying into practice of religious principles, and beliefs, and convictions.
Alan Keyes
#13. The First Amendment is often inconvenient. But that is beside the point. Inconvenience does not absolve the government of its obligation to tolerate speech.
Anthony Kennedy
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. Leftists would like to pretend that any criticism of their views raises the specter of domestic repression. But in a country with a First Amendment, no suppression from government is likely, and in the citadels of the media and the academy, the far left is actually vastly overrepresented.
Andrew Sullivan
#17. The First Amendment is not an altar on which we must sacrifice our children, families, and community standards. Obscene material that is not protected by the First Amendment can and must be prohibited.
Orrin Hatch
#18. 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
#19. I begin to feel like most Americans don't understand the First Amendment, don't understand the idea of freedom of speech, and don't understand that it's the responsibility of the citizen to speak out.
Roger Ebert
#20. The First Amendment is crucial. Of course it is. So are all the others. And the Second Amendment is the one that guarantees that people can bear arms to protect themselves.
Charlton Heston
#21. There is nothing as dangerous as an unembodied principle: no matter what blood flows, the principle comes first. The First Amendment absolutists operate precisely on unembodied principle ...
Andrea Dworkin
#22. The first exception [to the First Amendment] will not be the last.
Ira Glasser
#23. In this country [the USA], you have got to tolerate things you do not like in order to preserve the First Amendment, in order to preserve democracy, and if people start bullying people into fearing that if I say something I could offend people, that is exactly why we have a constitution.
Harvey Levin
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. The purpose of the University of Washington cannot be to produce black lawyers for blacks, Polish lawyers for Poles, Jewish lawyers for Jews, Irish lawyers for Irish. It should be to produce good lawyers for Americans and not to place First Amendment barriers against anyone.
William O. Douglas
#27. When you have mass surveillance, it's impossible to meet the intent of the First Amendment because reporters can't talk to sources because sources are afraid to talk.
Pierre Omidyar
#28. 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
#29. I love the protest signs protected by the First Amendment - some of them humorous, some of them passionate, some factual, some entirely incorrect - all of them free ideas.
Jennifer Granholm
#30. As a consequence, the Court ruled that the limits on campaign spending violated the First Amendment, but it accepted the $1,000 limit on individual contributions on the ground that the need to avoid the appearance of corruption justified this limited constraint on speech.
James L. Buckley
#31. The prima facie evidence provision in this case ignores all of the contextual factors that are necessary to decide whether a particular cross burning is intended to intimidate. The First Amendment does not permit such a shortcut.
Sandra Day O'Connor
#32. Under the First Amendment's prohibition of the establishment of religion, the Court has steadily made religion a matter for the private individual by driving it out of the public arena.
Robert Bork
#33. The First Amendment freedom of religion is as important today as when the Bill of Rights was first written.
Arlen Specter
#34. The HHS rule blatantly denies the breadth of First Amendment protection, and violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, under which Congress promotes First Amendment liberty by prohibiting government from unduly burdening religious freedom.
Andrew McCarthy
#35. The DISCLOSE Act is a testament to the wisdom of the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United. The First Amendment sought to place political speech beyond the government's control, and we can be glad that it did.
Bradley A. Smith
#37. The history of our nation is intertwined with a certain religious tradition, and that the First Amendment was not intended to result in the complete exclusion of religious beliefs from our public classrooms.
William Bennett
#38. 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
#39. The next great First Amendment battleground is just six inches high. It is a license plate bearing the Confederate flag.
Anonymous
#40. Authoritative interpretations of the First Amendment guarantees have consistently refused to recognize an exception for any test of truth whether administered by judges, juries, or administrative officials and especially one that puts the burden of proving truth on the speaker.
William J. Brennan
#41. The press is the only institution that is truly accountable. The founding fathers put the First Amendment first for a reason.
Rupert Murdoch
#42. Our 1 million members across the country will be watching closely to see if the video game industry hides behind a First Amendment veil in order to exploit children for the sake of corporate profit.
Connie Sellecca
#43. The First Amendment was written by the Founders to protect the free exercise of Christianity.
Bryan Fischer
#44. The Defense Department's plan to ban newspaper reporters from pool coverage of military operations is incredible. It reveals the administration to be out of touch with journalism, reality and the First Amendment.
Arthur Ochs Sulzberger
#45. The real object of the First Amendment was not to countenance, much less advance Mohammedanism, or Judaism or infidelity, by prostrating Christianity; but ... to prevent any national ecclesiastical establishment which should give to a hierarchy the exclusive patronage of the national government.
Joseph Story
#46. 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
#47. The first amendment ensures not that speech will be fair, but that it will be free. It cannot be both.
David Mamet
#48. The First Amendment says nothing about your getting paid for saying anything. It just says you can say it. I don't believe that if a corporation pulls all the money out of you or a network pulls their money away or you get fired, you're being censored.
Penn Jillette
#49. The First Amendment is first for a reason - it cannot be ignored by the D.C. City Council.
James Lankford
#50. Free Speech in the College Community is a very timely book written by a dedicated scholar of the First Amendment. Challenging and readable it should be studied by all academicians, students, legislators and lawyers.
Nancy Kassebaum
#51. The question about those aromatic advertisements that perfume companies are having stitched into magazines these days is this: under the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment, is smelling up the place a constitutionally protected form of expression?
Calvin Trillin
#52. Under the First Amendment there is no such thing as a false idea. However pernicious an opinion may seem, we depend for its correction not on the conscience of judges and juries but on the competition of other ideas.
Lewis F. Powell Jr.
#53. The First Amendment allows Nazis and white extremists to do what they are going to do, and it allows for black extremists and all other types of extremists to do what they are going to do. I understand that, and I'm not opposed to that.
Niger Innis
#54. We all have the right of freedom of speech under the First Amendment. We all don't have to agree with one another on our opinions. Everyone in my circle, that I run around with, we all feel the same about God, country, integrity and character.
Luke Scott
#55. 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
#56. The way liberals are interpreting the First Amendment today is that it prevents anyone who is religious from being in government.
Rush Limbaugh
#57. There are some circumstances in which the First Amendment interest comes up against another interest that is really important and in which we have to make a decision in a particular case as to which is more important.
Floyd Abrams
#58. Concerning First Amendment fetishism - A federal subsidy for a photo of a crucifix suspended in a jar of urine is fine, but religious figures on stamps are offensive.
Don Feder
#59. An M.P. once suggested I be put in the Tower of London for saying derogatory things about the royals. There's no First Amendment in my country.
Tracey Ullman
#60. 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
#61. Pulling a crystalline, cogent rule out of the murk of the court's First Amendment, public forum, and Establishment Clause doctrine is an act of creation too complicated for mere mortals.
Dahlia Lithwick
#62. I must acknowledge God. It says so in the Constitution of Alabama. It says so in the First Amendment of the Constitution.
Roy Moore
#63. No one understands that the First Amendment is only important if you are going to offend somebody. If you're not going to offend somebody, you don't need protection of the First Amendment.
Larry Flynt
#64. You're telling me that the separation of church and state is found in the First Amendment?
Christine O'Donnell
#65. The First Amendment is not a blanket freedom-of-information act. The constitutional newsgathering freedom means the media can go where the public can, but enjoys no superior right of access.
George Will
#66. You probably have the right to disclose them, guaranteed by the First Amendment, but that's no guarantee that will keep you away from criminal prosecution.
Kenneth Eade
#67. The First Amendment is very important, but it's not everything.
Anthony Lewis
#68. Outlawing religion form the political arena is not what the Founding Fathers intended when they drafted the First Amendment. We do a grave disservice to our country by removing the influence of religion. If you separate God from the public arena, inevitably you separate good from our government.
Bill Bright
#69. The debate about the war seems pretty robust and free. Many publications, from the New Yorker to the Nation, feel perfectly comfortable printing anti-American articles and that's fine. That's what the First Amendment is all about.
Rich Lowry
#70. All ideas having even the slightest redeeming social importance - unorthodox ideas, controversial ideas, even ideas hateful to the prevailing climate of opinion, have the full protection of the guarantees [of the First Amendment].
William J. Brennan
#71. There is no separation of church and state. Modern US Supreme Courts have raped the Constitution and raped the Christian faith and raped the churches by misinterpreting what the Founders had in mind in the First Amendment to the Constitution.
Jerry Falwell
#72. 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
#73. First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully.
John Yoo
#74. The First Amendment means everything to me.
Julian Bond
#75. I have four children, and I want them to grow up in a country that has a working First Amendment.
Frank Zappa
#76. I am for the First Amendment from the first word to the last. I believe it means what it says.
Hugo Black
#77. If the Constitution was a movie, the Preamble would be the trailer, the First Amendment the establishing shot, the 13th the crowd pleaser and the 14th the ultimate hero scene.
Henry Rollins
#78. Today, the religion clauses of the First Amendment do not need to be fixed; they need to be followed.
Walter F. Mondale
#79. 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
#80. People may be due the benefits of a democratic electoral process. But in the United States, content curators appropriately have a First Amendment right to present their content as they see fit.
Jonathan Zittrain
#81. I think it is appropriate that we pay tribute to this great constitutional principle which is enshrined in the First Amendment of the Constitution: the principle of religious independence, of religious liberty, of religious freedom.
John F. Kennedy
#82. The basis of the First Amendment is the hypothesis that speech can rebut speech, propaganda will answer propaganda, free debate of ideas will result in the wisest governmental policies.
Fred M. Vinson
#83. The First Amendment was specifically designed for citizens to insult politicians. Libel laws were written to protect law students speaking out on political issues from getting called whores by Oxycontin addicts.
Bill Maher
#84. The censor is always quick to justify his function in terms that are protective of society. But the First Amendment, written in terms that are absolute, deprives the States of any power to pass on the value, the propriety, or the morality of a particular expression.
William O. Douglas
#85. 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
#86. The First Amendment is now being used by the secularists of our day as a cattle prod to herd conservative religious people out of the public life of the nation and into, as others have put it, a religious ghetto.
Pat Swindall
#87. 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
#88. Every public elementary school ought to welcome Good News Clubs. Parents appreciate them; children love them; and the First Amendment protects them. The First Amendment requires that similar groups be provided with equal treatment. Religious speech is not a disability. It is our preeminent freedom.
Mathew Staver
#90. There is never a shortage anywhere of lawyers eager to attack the First Amendment, as though it were nothing more than a clause in a lease from a crooked slumlord.
Kurt Vonnegut
#91. But it's hard to talk about art. Maybe there should be a law against it, some First Amendment gag order like crying fire in a crowded theater.
Stanley Elkin
#92. I remember when TV networks believed in the First Amendment. It is a messed up situation when Miley Cyrus gets a laugh, and Phil Robertson gets suspended.
Bobby Jindal
#93. It is called the First Amendment ... Simple words marching in seried ranks. Compact, concise. To the point. Clear and pure. It's freedom's music.
Jack Valenti
#94. The First Amendment provides the only kind of security system that can preserve a free government - one that leaves the way wide open for people to favor, discuss, advocate, or incite causes and doctrines however obnoxious and antagonistic such views may be to the rest of us.
Hugo Black
#95. Money, first and foremost, is a medium of communication, conveying the information we call 'price'. Government control of the money supply is censorship, a violation of the First Amendment. Inflation is a lie.
L. Neil Smith
#96. The First Amendment, I think, is the jewel of our Constitution.
Samuel Alito
#97. Government ... may not be hostile to any religion or to the advocacy of no-religion; and it may not aid, foster, or promote one religion or religious theory against another ... The First Amendment mandates governmental neutrality ...
Abe Fortas
#98. If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his house, what books he may read or what films he may watch.
Thurgood Marshall
#99. Librarians see themselves as the guardians of the First Amendment. You got a thousand Mother Joneses at the barricades! I love the librarians, and I am grateful for them!
Michael Moore
#100. The Washington Times wrote a story questioning the authenticity of some of the suggestions made about me in Silent Coup. But as a believer in the First Amendment, I believe they have more than a right to air their views.
Bob Woodward
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