Censorship and Free Speech Quotes

Let us dare to read, think, speak and write.

John Adams

All the other candidates are making speeches about how much they have done for their country, which is ridiculous. I haven't done anything yet, and I think it's just common sense to send me to Washington and make me do my share.

Gracie Allen

A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.

Margaret Atwood

A thing is not necessarily true because badly uttered, nor false because spoken magnificently.

Saint Augustine of Hippo

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech. . . . One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

Gaston Bachelard

It is generally better to deal by speech than by letter.

Sir Francis Bacon

Discretion in speech is more than eloquence.

Sir Francis Bacon

If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.

Noam Chomsky

The United States is a land of free speech. Nowhere is speech freer - not even here where we sedulously cultivate it even in its most repulsive form.

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill

Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.

Nadine Gordimer

The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may think what we like and say what we think.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.

Hubert H. Humphrey

Men in earnest have no time to waste in patching fig-leaves for the naked truth.

James Russell Lowell

We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police; but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder "censorship," we call it "concern for commercial viability."

David Mamet

You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.

John Morley

Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.

Salman Rushdie

I am of course confident that I will fulfill my tasks as a writer in all circumstances--from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death. But may it be that repeated lessons will finally teach us not to stop the writer's pen during his lifetime? At no time has this ennobled our history.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart, the excision of its memory.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them.

Alexis de Tocqueville

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

Voltaire

Right now I think censorship is necessary; the things they're doing and saying in films right now just shouldn't be allowed. There's no dignity anymore and I think that's very important.

Mae West