A free read

Feel free to read at your leisure. Or perhaps you may choose not to read. If however you do choose to read, feel free to approve or disapprove, also feel free to agree or disagree. This is a free read.

“Without free speech no search for Truth is possible; without free speech no discovery of Truth is useful; without free speech progress is checked, and the nations no longer march forward towards the nobler life which the future holds for man. Better a thousandfold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day; the denial slays the life of the people and entombs the hope of the [human]race.” (Charles Bradlaugh, speech at Hall of Science, 1880)

 “Once a government [or any collective or person for that matter] is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” (President Harry S. Truman).

“Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government; when this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved, and tyranny is erected on its ruins.” (Benjamin Franklin).

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.” (George Orwell).

"The Government may not suppress lawful speech as the means to suppress unlawful speech." (Anthony Kennedy, Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, 2002)

“Without an unfettered press, without liberty of speech, all the outward forms and structures of free institutions are a sham, a pretense--the sheerest mockery. If the press is not free; if speech is not independent and untrammelled; if the mind is shackled or made impotent through fear, it makes no difference under what form of government you live you are a subject and not a citizen.” (William E. Borah, remarks to the Senate, April 19, 1917)

“Wherever despotism abounds, the sources of public information are the first to be brought under its control. Where ever the cause of liberty is making its way, one of its highest accomplishments is the guarantee of the freedom of the press.” (Calvin Coolidge, speech, Jan. 17, 1925)

“There's no fine line between "free speech" and "hate speech": Free speech is hate speech; it's for the speech you hate – and for all your speech that the other guy hates. If you don't have free speech, then you can't have an honest discussion.” (Mark Steyn, "Stay Quiet and You'll Be Okay", May 9, 2015)

“Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?” (Neil Postman) 

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.” (Noam Chomsky, The Common Good)

“The framers of the constitution knew human nature as well as we do. They too had lived in dangerous days; they too knew the suffocating influence of orthodoxy and standardized thought. They weighed the compulsions for restrained speech and thought against the abuses of liberty. They chose liberty.” [Beauharnais v. Illinois, 342 U.S. 250, 287 (1952) (dissenting)]” (William O. Douglas)

“Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one's thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. They know its power. Thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers, founded in injustice and wrong, are sure to tremble, if men are allowed to reason of righteousness, temperance, and of a judgment to come in their presence. (Frederick Douglass).

“Take away freedom of speech, and the creative faculties dry up.” (George Orwell)

“Free speech is not just another value. It's the foundation of Western civilization.” (Jordan Peterson)

“If you're going to say what you want to say, you're going to hear what you don't want to hear.” (Roberto Bolaño) 

“Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are incapable of forming such opinions." (Albert Einstein)

“We have to uphold a free press and freedom of speech -- because, in the end, lies and misinformation are no match for the truth.” (Barack Obama, remarks by President Obama to the people of Estonia, September 3, 2014).

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” (George Orwell, preface, Animal Farm)

“If You Want To Innovate Then Avoid The Herd: Groupthink Leads to Bad Decisions. Groupthink leads to bad decisions because they tend to ignore problems with the group’s decisions and discount outsiders.” (Phil McKinney).

“Groupthink. According to psychologist Irving Janis, groupthink is “a deterioration of mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment that results from in-group pressures. … and can lead to unethical behavior.” (Ethics unwrapped. McCoombs School of Business. University of Texas) 

“The problem with today’s world is that everyone believes they have the right to express their opinion AND have others listen to it. The correct statement of individual rights is that everyone has the right to an opinion, but crucially, that opinion can be roundly ignored and even made fun of, particularly if it is demonstrably nonsense!” (Brian Cox).Brian Cox is an English physicist who serves as professor of particle physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester. 

“I’d like to complain about people who constantly hold things up by complaining about people who complain. It’s high time something was done about it!” (Monty Python)

“Goebbels was in favor of freedom of speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you're in favor of freedom of speech, that means you're in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise." (Noam Chomsky)

“To whom do you award the right to decide which speech is harmful, or who is the harmful speaker? Or to determine in advance what are the harmful consequences going to be, that we know enough about in advance to prevent? To whom would you give this job? To whom are you going to award the task of being the censor?” (Christopher Hitchens. Be It Resolved: Freedom of Speech Includes the Freedom to Hate - 15 November 2006

“The mob is the most ruthless of tyrants;” (Friedrich Nietzsche).

“To believe in personal responsibility would be to destroy the whole special role of the anointed, whose vision casts them in the role of rescuers of people treated unfairly by “society”.” (Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy)

 “Ideologies are substitutes for true knowledge, and ideologues are always dangerous when they come to power, because a simple-minded I-know-it-all approach is no match for the complexity of existence.” (Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)

 “You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization -- including work, behavioral standards, personal responsibility and all the other basic things that the [so-called self-anointed] clever intelligentsia disdain -- without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large.” (Thomas Sowell)

 “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” (George Orwell)

“When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate.” (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)

“People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

“I have always been among those who believed that the greatest freedom of speech was the greatest safety, because if a man is a fool, the best thing to do is to encourage him to advertise the fact by speaking. (Woodrow Wilson, address at the Institute of France, "That Quick Comradeship of Letters", May 10, 1919)

“Free speech is not speech you agree with, uttered by someone you admire. It's speech that you find stupid, selfish, dangerous, uninformed or threatening, spoken and sponsored by someone you despise, fear or ridicule.” (Robert J. Samuelson, “In politics, money is speech”, Washington Post, April 6, 2014)

"The censor is always quick to justify his function in terms that are protective of society. But the First Amendment, written in terms that are absolute, deprives the States of any power to pass on the value, the propriety, or the morality of a particular expression." (William O. Douglas, Memoirs v. Massachusetts, 1966)

“There is nothing so fretting and vexatious, nothing so justly terrible to tyrants, and their tools and abettors, as a free press." (Samuel Adams, Boston Gazette, 1768)

"Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. (Samuel Johnson, attributed," The Life of Samuel Johnson)

“Strange it is that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free speech but object to their being “pushed to an extreme”, not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case. (John Stuart Mill)

“Should freedom of speech include the freedom to tell lies? Who decides what is true and what is a lie? Should the young and impressionable be exposed to propaganda deliberately designed to make them hate others? If we deny the deniers the right to spread their venom, are we then putting our own right to free speech at risk? At which point does hate speech so directly provoke violence that it should be banned?" (Ted Gottfried)

"Effective self-government cannot succeed unless the people are immersed in a steady, robust, unimpeded, and uncensored flow of opinion and reporting which are continuously subjected to critique, rebuttal, and reexamination." (William O. Douglas, Branzburg v. Hayes, 1972)

“Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties; and that in its government the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that without free speech and assembly discussion would be futile; that with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty; and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government." (Louis Brandeis, Whitney v. California, 1927)

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”Evelyn Beatrice Hall, wrote under the pseudonym S. G. Tallentyre She was an English writer best known for her biography of Voltaire entitled The Life of Voltaire, first published in 1903. She also wrote The Friends of Voltaire, which she completed in 1906. In The Friends of Voltaire, Hall wrote the phrase: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” as an illustration of Voltaire's beliefs. This quotation (which is sometimes misattributed to Voltaire himself) is often cited to describe the principle of freedom of speech.