Top 75 Quotes About Libel
#1. Journalists who make mistakes get sued for libel; historians who make mistakes get to publish a revised edition.
Bill Moyers
#2. Since neither black animosity nor the Left's falsehood of "racial tensions" is based on the actual behavior of the vast majority of white Americans, nothing white America can do will affect the perceptions of many black Americans or of the leftist libel.
Dennis Prager
#3. The same law applies to me. Nobody has sued me for libel because I do not defame my enemies.
Lee Kuan Yew
#4. The Italians are said to be noisy and to gesticulate, but that is a libel dreamed up by the English.
Jean Giono
#5. 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
#6. In Britain, libel damages are small and people build them into the cost of doing business. In America, libel is very rare and much harder to prove, but the damages are enormous.
Graydon Carter
#7. An editorial of the Journal AMA, Jan 8, 1949, discussed the Gerson Therapy under the heading 'Frauds and Fables'. At that time, Dr. Gerson's lawyer wrote a letter to the JAMA, threatening a suit for libel ... The editorial was withdrawn ... (leaving) columns which were blank.
Charlotte Gerson
#9. Titles are tinsel, power a corrupter, glorya bubble, and excessive wealth a libel on its possessor.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#10. As any editor will tell you, startling newsroom revelations are generally met with queries about where the information came from and how the reporter got it. Seriously startling revelations are followed by the vetting of libel lawyers.
Graydon Carter
#11. Newspapermen learn to call a murderer "an alleged murderer" and the King of England "the alleged King of England" in order to avoid libel suits.
Stephen Leacock
#12. Oscar Wilde was suing the Marquis of Queensbury in 1895 for libel accusing Wilde of homosexuality
Counsel: Have you ever adored a young man madly?
Wilde: I have never given adoration to anyone except myself.
Oscar Wilde
#13. I've made a lot of enemies in all the right places, and there aren't enough hours in the day to respond to either the well-financed corporate hacks or the lowly stalkers who seek to libel me or make a buck off the fact that I'm a well-known person.
Michael Moore
#14. You can not libel the dead, I think, you can only console them.
Anne Enright
#16. I mean, in some cases with libel laws, you know, they can write things about people who have no course of action, because they can't afford to take legal action against them.
Elton John
#17. It's a libel to say that I use my newspapers to support my other business interests. The fact is, I haven't got any other business interests.
Rupert Murdoch
#18. No significant American group hates like the left does. If you differ with them - from global warming, to race relations, to same-sex marriage, to the extent of rape on college campuses - they will humiliate, defame, libel and try to economically crush you.
Dennis Prager
#19. I am suing Lord Beaverbrook for libel and hope for some lovely tax-free money in damages. He has very conveniently told some lies about me.
Evelyn Waugh
#20. It is better, however, for his own reputation that the story-teller should risk a few actions for libel on account of these unfortunate coincidences than that he should adopt the melancholy device of using blanks or asterisks.
James Payn
#21. If you call your opponent a politician, it's grounds for libel.
Mark Russell
#22. The problem is that in our country, they make it almost impossible for politicians to win anything. In England it's easier to win a libel suit.
Rand Paul
#23. Ay - 'The Green Fool' business, the libel action over the head of it - did me a lot of damage. It destroyed the momentum.
Patrick Kavanagh
#24. All the libel lawyers will tell you there's no libel any more, that everyone's given up.
Ian Hislop
#25. Every libel, which is called famosus libellus, is made either against a private man, or against a public person. If it be against a private man, it deserves a severe punishment.
Edward Coke
#26. The blood libel took possession of the popular mind most rabidly in Germany, where the well-poisoning charge too had originated in the 12th century.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#27. If when I am libelled I take no notice, the world believes the libel. If I sue, I have to pay about one hundred pounds' costs for the privilege, and gain the smallest coin the country knows for recompense.
Charles Bradlaugh
#28. No other country in the world gives protection like that, but it is not absolute protection. People sometimes meet that high burden and win libel suits, and in those cases I think they ought to win.
Floyd Abrams
#29. Seditious libel is the doctrine that flourished in England during and after the Star Chamber. It is the hallmark of closed societies throughout the world. Under it, criticism of government is viewed as defamation and punished as a crime.
Harry Kalven
#30. A man is angry at a libel because it is false, but at a satire because it is true.
G.K. Chesterton
#31. I've stopped caring about skeptics, but if they libel or defame me they will end up in court.
Uri Geller
#32. I shall make it my business to take my chances in the matter of libel suits.
Victoria Woodhull
#33. The Bible urges us to be respectful to all people, especially people with whom we have disagreements, to never libel people, to never label people.
Max Lucado
#34. Any time, every time, you can damn the Prime Minister and so long as it is not a lie and a criminal lie, nothing happens to you. You can say a lot of things. You can write books about him, damning him. So long as it is not a libel, go ahead.
Lee Kuan Yew
#35. There isn't any way to libel the human race.
Mark Twain
#36. It is an old saying, "A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword"; and many men are as much galled with a calumny, a scurrile and bitter jest, a libel, a pasquil, satire, apologue, epigram, stage-plays, or the like, as with any misfortune whatsoever.
Robert Burton
#37. The Latin proverb, homo homini lupus - man is a wolf to man - ... is a libel on the wolf, which is a gentle animal with other wolves.
Geoffrey Gorer
#38. Within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.
Sarah Palin
#39. Middle-aged adolescents are a libel on the real thing.
Mason Cooley
#40. Feminism has tried to dismiss the femme fatale as a misogynist libel, a hoary cliche. But the femme fatale expresses woman's ancient and eternal control of the sexual realm. The specter of the femme fatale stalks all of men's relationships with women.
Camille Paglia
#41. Too many of us look upon Americans as dollar chasers. This is a cruel libel, even if it is reiterated thoughtlessly by the Americans themselves.
Albert Einstein
#42. The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.
James Thurber
#43. Morgan was sent copies and decided to sue both publishers for libel.
David Cordingly
#44. Wart hogs should sue for libel. It is a terrible name and they are fine fellows and devoted family men and it is rare to see one by himself; the little woman and the kiddies are usually close at hand.
Ilka Chase
#45. For what is history, but ... huge libel on human nature, to which we industriously add page after page, volume after volume, as if we were holding up a monument to the honor, rather than the infamy of our species.
Washington Irving
#46. Banning guns because of their misuse is like banning the First Amendment because one might libel or slander.
Ron Paul
#47. His face was stern, and much flushed. If he were really not in the habit of drinking rather more than was exactly good for him, he might have brought action against his countenance for libel, and have recovered heavy damages.
Charles Dickens
#48. When public men indulge themselves in abuse, when they deny others a fair trial, when they resort to innuendo and insinuation, to libel, scandal, and suspicion, then our democratic society is outraged, and democracy is baffled.
J. William Fulbright
#49. Nor do they trust their tongue alone, but speak a language of their own; can read a nod, a shrug, a look, far better than a printed book; convey a libel in a frown, and wink a reputation down.
Jonathan Swift
#50. The libel laws in Australia are a lot tougher than they are in America.
Jacki Weaver
#51. Now that the very name "space" seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it 'dead'; he felt life pouring in at every moment.
C.S. Lewis
#52. It is as though in the middle of a chess tournament one competitor should suddenly begin screaming that the other is guilty of arson or bigamy. The point that is really at issue remains untouched. Libel settles nothing ...
George Orwell
#53. It is a lamentable observation that because of the way our laws are skewed toward the plaintiff, London has become the libel capital of the world.
Richard Dawkins
#54. I am dumbfounded that there hasn't been a crackdown with the libel and slander laws on some of these would-be writers and reporters on the Internet.
Walter Cronkite
#55. Every man knows that slavery is a curse. Whoever denies this, his lips libel his heart.
Theodore Dwight Weld
#56. Among the sins to which the human heart is prone, hardly any other is more hateful to God than idolatry, for idolatry is at bottom a libel on His character. The
A.W. Tozer
#57. I tell the truth, and truth is the ultimate defense against libel.
Tucker Max
#60. I don't think that there is absolute freedom of the press. We operate under laws - against libel, for instance. The idea that there is some absolute press freedom is kind of a myth.
Bill Keller
#61. We want to protect freedom of speech, but it is not unlimited freedom of speech. There has always been rules around defamation, slander and libel, and in Victoria, we have effective rules on racial and religious vilification.
Denis Napthine
#62. had come out and said - if not in so many words - that he was innocent of libel and that another truth existed. Precisely because she had not used the word "innocent," his innocence
Stieg Larsson
#63. As she dressed that night, Lucy remembered Catherine's words: "If it's true, it isn't libel.
Leslie Meier
#65. Libel actions, when we look at them in perspective, are an ornament of a civilized society. They have replaced, after all, at least in most cases, a resort to weapons in defense of a reputation.
Henry Anatole Grunwald
#66. Saying someone is gay who is gay no longer constitutes defamation or slander or libel. You cannot defame someone by telling the truth.
Larry Kramer
#67. Keep your finger on the pulse of society, take controversies with a grain of salt, lick your finger and then lift it to the wind; always know what is going on, my friend, so this world can never steer you wrong again.
Criss Jami
#68. Who can make a more effective appeal to the heart than woman?
Mahatma Gandhi
#69. Sometimes you feel as though you've slandered yourself, but the joke's on them.
Criss Jami
#71. In a society where dirt sells, for every good story told as it is, you will hear the whole of that day's 10 bad stories sensationalized; although in reality, it could be that 100 good deeds happened that day which went unsung.
Criss Jami
#72. More solid things do not show the complexion of the times so well as Ballads and Libels.
John Selden
#73. In a world that loves lies, truth is subject to the greatest libels.
Orrin Woodward
#74. Enter RUMOUR, painted full of tongues.
[Stage direction, Henry IV, Part 2, Induction]
William Shakespeare
#75. RUMOUR:
Upon my tongues continual slanders ride,
The which in every language I pronounce,
Stuffing the ears of men with false reports.
William Shakespeare
