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A people which is able to say everything becomes able to do everything.
-Napoleon Bonaparte
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Free speech is about as good as cause as the world has ever known. But, like the poor, it is always with us and gets shoved aside in favour of things which seem at some given moment more vital.
-Heywood Broun
The Miracle of Debs, "New York World", October 23, 1926
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We must bring ourselves to realize that it is necessary to support free speech for the things we hate in order to ensure it for the things in which we believe with all our heart.
-Heywood Broun, "New York World", January 26, 1923
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The right to discuss freely and openly, by speech, by the pen, by the press, all political questions, and to examine and animadvert (speak out) upon all political institutions, is a right so clear and certain, so interwoven with our other liberties, so necessary, in fact to their existence, that without it we must fall at once into depression or anarchy. To say that he who holds unpopular opinions must hold them at the peril of his life, and that, if he expresses them in public, he has only himself to blame if they who disagree with him should rise and put him to death, is to strike at all rights, all liberties, all protection of the laws, and to justify and extenuate all crimes.
-William Cullen Bryant, defending the right of abolitionists to free speech, 1837
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Free speech carries with it some freedom to listen.
-Warren Earl Burger, Majority opinion in 7-1 ruling that prohibited the closing of courtrooms to the press, July 2, 1980
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If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
-Noam Chomsky
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The great and invigorating influences in American life have been the unorthodox: the people who challenge an existing institution of way of life, or say and so things that make people think.
-William O. Douglas
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We who officially value freedom of speech above life itself seem to have nothing to talk about but the weather.
-Barbara Ehrenreich
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We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.
-E. M. Forster
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The primacy of the word, basis of the human psyche, that has in our age been used for mind-bending persuasion and brain-washing pulp, disgraced by Gobbles and debased by advertising copy, remains a force for freedom that flies out between all bars.
-Nadine Gordimer
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We hear about constitutional rights, free speech and the free press. Every time I hear those words I say to myself, That man is a Red, that man is a Communist. You never heard a real American talk in that manner.
-Frank Hague
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Speech is conveniently located midway between thought and action, where it often substitutes for both.
-John Andrew Holmes
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The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may thing what we like and say what we think.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.
-Samuel Johnson
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The liberty of the press is the Palladium of all the civil, political, and religious rights of an Englishman.
-Junius
The Letters of Junius 'Dedication to the English Nation'
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The freedom of the press works in such a way that there is not much freedom from it.
-Grace (Patricia) Kelly
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How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.
-Soren Kierkegaard
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When one makes a Revolution, one cannot mark time; one must always go forward -- or go back. He who now talks about the freedom of the press goes backward, and halts our headlong course towards Socialism.
-Lenin (Vladimir Ulyanov)
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At no time is freedom of speech more precious than when a man hits his thumb with a hammer.
-Marshall Lumsden
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Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.
-John Milton
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The only way to make sure people you agree with can speak is to support the rights of people you don't agree with.
-Eleanor Holmes Norton
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Marks on paper are free -- free speech -- press -- pictures all go together I suppose.
-Georgia O'Keeffe
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Free speech is intended to protect the controversial and even outrageous word; and not just comforting platitudes too mundane to need protection.
-Colin Powell
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Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
-Salman Rushdie
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The first principle of a free society is an untrammeled flow of words in an open forum.
-Adlai Stevenson
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Books about Speech (freedom of)
