Top 100 Quotes About Free Expression
#1. Everything I love: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression.
Christopher Hitchens
#2. The value of free expression is perceived to be at odds with goals that were considered 'more important,' like inclusiveness, diversity, nondiscrimination, and tolerance.
Greg Lukianoff
#3. The Internet, as a First Amendment medium, hinges on free expression, and that means free advertising.
Jerry Yang
#4. The free expression of opinion, as experience has taught us, is the safety-valve of passion. The noise of the rushing steam, when it escapes, alarms the timid; but it is the sign that we are safe. The concession of reasonable privilege anticipates the growth of furious-appetite.
Herbert Gladstone, 1st Viscount Gladstone
#5. I was in love with HTML and certain that the whole world was about to learn it, ushering in a new era of DIY media, free expression, peace and democracy and human rights worldwide. That part didn't work out so well, although the kids prefer YouTube to TV, so that's something.
Jeffrey Zeldman
#6. In theater and dance, I was trying to win someone's approval, trying to get in, trying to be good. It felt out of my control, whereas music suddenly felt like this free expression. It was fun.
Susanna Hoffs
#7. Nowadays the big Hollywood studios only make about three movies a year, and they cost about $200 million each. There's no room for error in that, and not a lot of room, I would think, for free expression.
Robbie Coltraine
#8. The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government, and to protect its free expression should be our first object.
Thomas Jefferson
#9. I know the constitution in Oregon was passed in 1859. Free expression of opinion.
Bill O'Reilly
#10. In whatever number of years I have on Earth, I think that promoting the values of free expression, the openness of the Internet, that's the best use of my time.
Eric Schmidt
#11. The right to free expression is something one seizes, not something one is given ... if it does exist, it exists to be used against the established order ... There is absolute opposition between the artist and the state.
Pablo Picasso
#13. Those who would rule with an iron fist always fear the free expression of opinions by those they would suppress.
Neal Boortz
#14. Art is the free expression of the artist and they tried to stop us from expressing ourselves, our art.
Marilyn Manson
#15. There is no free expression when you have to pay extra to stand on the soap box.
Thor Benson
#16. The censor's sword pierces deeply into the heart of free expression.
Earl Warren
#17. Our spirit requires freedom in every area of our lives. The barriers that stop our soul from free expression are doubt, guilt, resentment, and thoughts of lack or limitation.
Hina Hashmi
#18. The whole point of free expression is not to make ideas exempt from criticism but to expose them to it.
Garry Wills
#19. Free expression is the gateway to assimilation. Consequently, radical Islam cannot tolerate it.
Andrew C. McCarthy
#20. Trouble looms when monogamy is no longer a free expression of loyalty but a form of enforced compliance.
Esther Perel
#21. I'm all in favour of free expression provided it's kept rigidly under control.
Alan Bennett
#22. Science needs the light of free expression to flourish. It depends on the fearless questioning of authority, and the open exchange of ideas.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#23. The will of the entire people is the true basis of republican government, and a free expression ... by the public vote of all citizens, without distinctions of race, color, occupation, or sex, is the only means by which that will can be ascertained.
Victoria Woodhull
#24. The free expression of resentment against one's parents represents a great opportunity. It provides access to one's true self, reactivates numbed feelings, opens the way for mourning and - with luck - reconciliation.
Alice Miller
#25. To curtail free expression strikes twice at intellectual freedom, for whoever deprives another of the right to state unpopular views necessarily deprives others of the right to listen to those views.
C. Vann Woodward
#26. The American feels too rich in his opportunities for free expression that he often no longer knows what he is free from. Neither does he know where he is not free; he does not recognize his native autocrats when he sees them.
Erik Erikson
#27. Over the past several decades, a growing number of investors have been choosing to put their money in funds that screen companies for their environmental and labor records. Some socially responsible investors are starting to add free expression and privacy to their list of criteria.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#28. Several amendments should be made to the primary and general election laws to improve them, but such changes must in no way interfere with a full and free expression of the people's choice in naming the candidates to be voted on at general elections.
Arthur Capper
#29. The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms.
Oscar Wilde
#30. At some point free expression absolutism becomes childish and unserious.
Garry Trudeau
#31. Michael Moore and I actually have a lot in common. We both appreciate living in a country where there's free expression. But Michael, if you ever show up at my front door with a camera, I'll kill you. I mean it.
Clint Eastwood
#32. Long-established totalitarian governments fear any kind of free expression. A sculpture can be a manifesto, a manuscripted adventure can double as a cry for rebellion.
Alan Dean Foster
#33. The free expression of the hopes and aspirations of a people is the greatest and only safety in a sane society.
Emma Goldman
#34. American style is about confidence, independence, diversity and free expression.
Tommy Hilfiger
#35. You can have no wise laws nor free enforcement of wise laws unless there is free expression of the wisdom of the people
and, alas, their folly with it. But if there is freedom, folly will die of its own poison, and the wisdom will survive.
William Allen White
#36. It is our attitude toward free thought and free expression that will determine our fate. There must be no limit on the range of temperate discussion, no limits on thought. No subject must be taboo. No censor must preside at our assemblies.
William O. Douglas
#37. Until fighting ends and there are conditions, which allow the free expression of will by the people, there can be no elections and elections are not held in these circumstances anywhere in the world.
Aslan Maskhadov
#38. Freedom demands that we struggle for an extension of both equality and free expression, not regard one as inimical to the other.
Kenan Malik
#39. Play is the highest expression of human development in childhood for it alone is the free expression of what is in a child's soul.
Friedrich Frobel
#40. Free expression is the base of human rights, the root of human nature and the mother of truth. To kill free speech is to insult human rights, to stifle human nature and to suppress truth.
Liu Xiaobo
#41. I have to respect my life, and free expression is part of my life. I can never really silence myself.
Ai Weiwei
#42. But please know, whether you believe campaign contributions are speech or property, that I learned to love very dearly the right of free expression when I lived without that freedom for a while a long time ago.
John McCain
#43. There is no country on Earth where Internet and telecommunications companies do not face at least some pressure from governments to do things that would potentially infringe on users' rights to free expression and privacy.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#44. Above all, every member of the university has an obligation to permit free expression in the university. No member has a right to prevent such expression. Every official of the university, moreover, has a special obligation to foster free expression and to ensure that it is not obstructed.
C. Vann Woodward
#45. We're not mindless golems, designed to think exactly the same thing. To try to suppress those thoughts is no better than slavery, and being free to say what you want, write what you want or draw what you want, as long as it doesn't offend anyone... That's no freedom at all.
T.J. Dixon
#46. Too commonly sex does not have the dignity of a sacramental event because sex is thought to be the means of the search for self rather than the expression and communication of one who has already found himself, and is free from resort to sex in the frantic pursuit of his own identity.
William Stringfellow
#47. If we think to regulat Printing, thereby to rectifie manners, we must regulat all recreations and pastimes, all that is delightfull to Man.
John Milton
#48. Peace adores above everything free discussion and expression without intimidation.
Bryant McGill
#49. I would like my books to stand as a tool to unbind children from expectations of poetry because it should free the child to self-expression and exploration.
Masiela Lusha
#50. If you are not personally free to be yourself in that most important of all human activities ... the expression of love ... then life itself loses its meaning.
Harvey Milk
#51. When you are present, your mind is silent. Free of opinions, concepts and beliefs and free of projections from the past and anxiety about the future, it is a perfectly clear instrument of expression. And the expression comes from the center of your Being.
Leonard Jacobson
#52. Artists, by their free expressions, encourage others to be free. This is the quality that makes works of art enduring.
Marty Rubin
#53. There has to be a cut-off somewhere between the freedom of expression and a graphically explicit free-for-all.
E.A. Bucchianeri
#54. Artists talk a lot about freedom. So, recalling the expression "free as a bird," Morton Feldman went to a park one day and spent some time watching our feathered friends. When he came back, he said, "You know? They're not free: they're fighting over bits of food.
John Cage
#55. The Internet has been seen in the West as the quintessential expression of the free exchange of ideas and information, untrammeled by government interference and increasingly global in reach. But the Chinese government has shown that the Internet can be successfully filtered and controlled.
Martin Jacques
#56. He liked the feeling of safety here in this warm and quiet room; he liked the expression of trust on the woman's face as she lay in the water unprotected, exposed, and free.
Louis Lowry
#57. If we do not believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we do not believe in it at all.
Noam Chomsky
#58. Please wake me when I'm free
I cannot bear captivity
4 I would rather be stricken blind
Than 2 live without expression of mind
Tupac Shakur
#59. If one has no affection for a person or a system, one should feel free to give the fullest expression to his disaffection so long as he does not contemplate, promote, or incite violence.
Mahatma Gandhi
#60. Trust the divine power, and she will free the godlike elements in you and shape all into an expression of divine nature.
Sri Aurobindo
#61. The vampire looked at her in bewilderment. Then he glanced toward the door and his expression grew sly. "If you free me, I could hold them off.
Holly Black
#62. You're free to do anything you want with your company. It's more like art. You don't have to follow any norms. It's an expression of how you feel the world should be. When you make a company, that's your little place to make your own little utopia.
Derek Sivers
#63. Freedom is always, and exclusively, freedom for the one who thinks differently.
Rosa Luxemburg
#64. In Brekkukot, words were too precious to use
because they meant something; our conversation was like pristine money before inflation; experience was too profound to be capable of expression; only the bluebottle was free.
Halldor Laxness
#65. Two things form the bedrock of any open society - freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don't have those things, you don't have a free country.
Salman Rushdie
#66. Learn technique; have full command to the extent of not being conscious of how it is done. When craftsmanship has been developed, you are free to create ... technique will give way to expression!
Sergei Bongart
#67. None of us would trade freedom of expression for the narrowness of the public censor. America is a free market for people who have something to say, and need not fear to say it.
Hubert H. Humphrey
#68. I'm just doing what I have to do. I don't have a choice."
"Yeah, good luck going to bed with a guilt-free conscience with that sorry-ass excuse."
The sour expression evaporated from Mr. Greek's face. His gaze switched back to the computer. "Keep talking and I'll gag you."
"Blow me.
Santino Hassell
#69. When someone comes along and expresses him or herself as freely as they think, people flock to it. They enjoy it.
Joe Rogan
#70. There is a great life-giving, warming power called Love, which exists in human hearts dumb and unseen, but which has no real life, no warming power, till set free by expression.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
#71. Once I stopped worrying about what people would think when they heard my truth, my truth set me free.
Deborah J. Monroe
#72. Sketching is the breath of art: it is the most refreshing of all the more impulsive forms of creative self-expression and, as such, it should be as free, and happy, as a song in the bath.
Mervyn Levy
#73. A virtue of the free enterprise system is that it offers every individual the greatest opportunity for self expression.
Lawrence Fertig
#74. People are free to find out the best and the worst of me!
Henry James
#75. It appears that some school officials, teachers, and parents have assumed that religious expression of any type is either inappropriate or forbidden altogether in public schools; however, nothing in the First Amendment converts our public schools into religion-free zones.
William J. Clinton
#76. You break through the veil whenever you strap on a sword or chant the ancient verses. You escape when you write a poem or a tale that brings beauty into the world. You are set free whenever you love - even those who believe you're crazy.
Jef Murray
#77. Free as a bird' was the expression, and yet they weren't free at all, not as far as Saffy could tell: they were bound to one another by their habits, their seasonal needs, their biology, their nature, their birth. No freer than anyone else. Still, they knew the exhilaration of flight.
Kate Morton
#78. Free and open expression coupled with visionary leadership generally encourages good decision-making.
M. Russell Ballard
#79. Free enterprise has enabled the creative and the acquisitive urges of man to be given expression in a way which benefits all members of society. Let free enterprise fight back now, not for itself, but for all those who believe in freedom.
Margaret Thatcher
#80. Self expression is the new entertainment, We never used to question why people sit on the couch for seven hours a day watching bad TV. Nobody ever asked, Why are they doing that for free? We need to celebrate [this desire to contribute for free] rather than question it.
Arianna Huffington
#81. My aim is to escape from the medium with which I work; to leave no residue of technical mannerisms to stand between my expression and the observer. To seek freedom through significant form and design rather than through the diversion of so-called free and accidental brush handling.
Andrew Wyeth
#82. We live in a free country. While patriotism is important, liberty of thought and liberty of expression are even more important.
James Green
#83. Morality consists in this for each individual: to attempt each time to extend its region of clear expression, to try to augment its amplitude, so as to produce a free act that expresses the most possible in one given condition or another.
Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, 73
Gilles Deleuze
#84. There is no doubt where the founding fathers stood on this issue. They believed that people of faith should be permitted to express themselves in public. They believed that this country was big enough and free enough to allow expression of on enormous variety of views and beliefs.
John Cornyn
#85. Morality, and the ideal of freedom which is the political expression of morality, are not the property of a given party or group, but a value that is fundamentally and universally human ... No people will be truly free till all are free.
Benedetto Croce
#86. [I]n my own case at least I feel my professional need for freedom of speech and expression prejudices me toward a government whose constitution guarantees it.
John Updike
#87. I'm very keen on having true freedom of expression. True freedom of faith. And free practice of religious faith.
Mohammed Morsi
#88. A kite can't really fly free,that's just an expression. In order to soar high in the sky the string of a kite needs to be anchored. If the string breaks the kite drops back to the ground. The kite's freedom depends on it not being as free as he thinks it is.
Simon Napier-Bell
#89. What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
Salman Rushdie
#90. Free music is in a constant state of surprise and, consequently, presents no surprise at all. So, I'm not really a fan of Free music. Having said that, Jazz is based on individual expression and I'm compelled to respect the Free player's option to express himself as he chooses.
Pete La Roca
#91. The moment you know your real being, you are afraid of nothing. Death gives freedom and power. To be free in the world, you must die to the world. Then the universe is your own, it becomes your body, an expression and a tool. The happiness of being absolutely free is beyond description.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
#92. I fear yet this iron yoke of outward conformity hath left a slavish print upon our necks: the ghost of a linnen decency yet haunts us.
John Milton
#93. For the United States, supporting international development is more than just an expression of our compassion. It is a vital investment in the free, prosperous, and peaceful international order that fundamentally serves our national interest.
Condoleezza Rice
#94. One may always attempt as much insight, love, freedom of thought and expression, justice and tolerance as possible for oneself and the very few people who share one's truest life. To be a 'free lord' in secret is better than being a public slave, a willing accomplice of repression and injustice.
Hakim Bey
#95. You can't cheer when political officials punish the expression of views you dislike and then expect to be taken seriously when you wrap yourself in the banner of free speech in order to protest state punishment of views you like and share.
Glenn Greenwald
#96. A book is the only true land of the free: within its borders, anything is possible
Agona Apell
#97. Stress can alter the expression of genes, which can affect the response to stress and so on. Human behavior is therefore unpredictable in the short term, but broadly predictable in the long term.
Matt Ridley
#98. My music is the spiritual expression of what I am - my faith, my knowledge, my being ... When you begin to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something really good for people, to help humanity free itself from its hangups ... I want to speak to their souls.
John Coltrane
#99. METAPHOR: A tightly fitting suit of metal, generally tin, which entirely encloses the wearer, both impeding free movement and preventing emotional expression and/or social contact.
Chris Ware
#100. As the consumer is the public general, without distinction of rank or fortune, the free market is the most obvious expression of the sovereignty of the people and the best guarantee of democracy.
Faustino Ballve
