Speech Censorship Quotes

#1. Every Democrat constituency group has at least two things in common. They hate us. They despise opposition. That's why they created political correctness. Speech censorship. They hate opposition and they'll do anything they can to eliminate it.

Rush Limbaugh

#2. Free speech not only lives, it rocks!

Oprah Winfrey

#3. Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.

Henry Louis Gates Jr.

#4. If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.
[Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357 (1927)]

Louis D. Brandeis

#5. I once had a mind of quicksand,
That dragged ideas into its depths,
Inhaling specks of sunlight,
Every time I drew a breath,
But the world thought me a hazard,
When every word I spoke, I meant,
So around me they put caution tape,
And filled me with cement.

Erin Hanson

#6. All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

George Bernard Shaw

#7. Censorship laws are blunt instruments, not sharp scalpels. Once enacted, they are easily misapplied to merely unpopular or only marginally dangerous speech.

Alan Dershowitz

#8. Beyond all the other reasons not to do it, free speech assaults always backfire: they transform bigots into martyrs.

Glenn Greenwald

#9. Those who claim to be hurt by words must be led to expect nothing as compensation. Otherwise, once they learn they can get something by claiming to be hurt, they will go into the business of being offended.

Jonathan Rauch

#10. Free speech is life itself.

Salman Rushdie

#11. Our country is the only one that truly permits you to speak bad of your country, so you really shouldn't say anything bad about it.

James Rozoff

#12. We hold that no person or set of persons can properly establish a standard of expression for others.

William Randolph Hearst

#13. What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.

Salman Rushdie

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. Heretical views arise when the truth is uncertain, and it is only when the truth is uncertain that censorship is invoked.

Bertrand Russell

#17. So yes, I say things I regret constantly, and I just can't help it.

Kathy Griffin

#18. When there is official censorship it is a sign that speech is serious. Where there is none, it is pretty certain that the official spokesmen have all the loud-speakers.

Paul Goodman

#19. While the Internet is censored in China, the censorship is allowing a level of speech to take place that's unprecedented.

Ethan Zuckerman

#20. Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.

A.J. Liebling

#21. 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

#22. Those who call for censorship in the name of the oppressed ought to recognize it is never the oppressed who determine the bounds of censorship.

Aryeh Neier

#23. While I've found many of the religious shows I've viewed over the years not to be to my liking, or in line with my own beliefs, I've never considered it my place to exert any greater type of censorship than changing the channel, or better yet - turning off the TV completely.

Bill Hicks

#24. I should say here, because some in Washington like to dream up ways to control the Internet, that we don't need to 'control' free speech, we need to control ourselves.

Peggy Noonan

#25. 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

#26.

[Blog post, March 10, 2014]

K.J. Charles

#27. 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

#28. What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.

Jacques Derrida

#29. Every writer's difficult journey is a movement from silence to speech. We must be intensely private and interior in order to find a voice and a vision - and we must bring our work to an outside world where the market, or public outrage, or even government censorship can destroy our voice.

Sara Paretsky

#30. Censors never go after books unless kids already like them. I don't even think they know to go after books until they know that children are interested in reading this book, therefore there must be something in it that's wrong.

Judy Blume

#31. The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.

Christopher Hitchens

#32. By placing discretion in the hands of an official to grant or deny a license, such a statute creates a threat of censorship that by its very existence chills free speech.

Harry A. Blackmun

#33. Banning books gives us silence when we need speech. It closes our ears when we need to listen. It makes us blind when we need sight.

Stephen Chbosky

#34. Religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.

Philip Pullman

#35. I fear gratuitous censorship more than gratuitous violence.

Marty Rubin

#36. Early American speeches, from Washington's to Patrick Henry's, have been detheologized in history textbooks. No one has called it censorship.

James G. Watt

#37. I'm a free speech bigot. I don't like censorship; I just don't think it's a good thing.

Fred Wilson

#38. The censor's sword pierces deeply into the heart of free expression.

Earl Warren

#39. The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion. In the long run it will create a generation incapable of appreciating the difference between independence of thought and subservience.

Henry Steele Commager

#40. Freedom is not only the absence of external restraints. It is also the absence of irresistible internal compulsions, unmanageable passion, and uncensorable highlights.

George Will

#41. When society gives censors wide and vague powers they never confine themselves to deserving targets. They are not snipers, but machine-gunners. Allow them to fire at will, and they will hit anything that moves.

Nick Cohen