Thought-provoking quotes: Free speech

I’ve collected quotes for decades. By that I mean, I’ve written down quotes I’ve read or heard which struck me as profound or enlightening. Sometimes a few sentences can bring understanding to an issue that a much lengthier piece of work fails to do. A good quote can also help you understand yourself better, gain a better grasp of life, and challenge your own notions, changing these, strengthening them, making you realize you are a wiseman or a fool.

I don’t expect those who are quoted pass a retroactive purity test. Especially today, when censorship is seen by many people as a good thing, a tool to fashion paradise, these quotes serve as a warning: Our future if we don’t respect and defend the right to free speech and thought—and this means defending it for those whose notions we might loathe.

Do not fall for the bullshit arguments in support of censorship, that the tyrant is “fighting” misinformation, hate, violence, bigotry, transphobia, etc. The censor is never well-meaning or on the side of the angels. Never.

You’ve been warned. A world without any offense or contrary opinions is a miserable world of crushing sameness, and can only be made so by totalitarianism. Modern technology gives the censor tools that past tyrants would surely envy—and themselves put to use if only they’d been given the chance.

These are quotes regarding freedom of speech, either specifically or in a broader way. I hope you’ll give some thought, perhaps long-overdue, to a right you likely take for granted.

I wonder what those quoted would think of today’s world that has gained so much and yet is so eager to throw away basic freedoms. I’ll keep saying this over and over: If you lose the basic human right to freedom of speech, you shall lose all of your other rights, as well…guaranteed…

“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.”

—Frederick Douglass

“To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker. It is just as criminal to rob a man of his right to speak and hear as it would be to rob him of his money.”

—Frederick Douglass

“It is better to speak softly, so that the gentlemen of the Inquisition may not hear.”

—Garjal

“The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but is not the path to knowledge.”

—Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“One can no more prevent the mind from returning to an idea than the sea from returning to a shore.”

—Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“For the truth is a terrible thing.”

—Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men

“Truth shines by its own light, and minds are not enlightened by the flames of the stake.”

—Voltaire, Candide

“This conspiracy of silence, in which everyone was involved, produced a pervasive fear that not only destroyed trust between people but created a feeling of inevitability against which it was useless to struggle.”

—Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives

“No one understood better than Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance.”

—Leonard Schapiro

“The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.”

—George Orwell, 1984

“It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be.”

—George Orwell, 1984

“2 + 2 = 5”

—George Orwell, 1984

“Art should not merely be ornamental; it ought also to act upon people, to disturb and influence them.”

—Serge Bramly, Leonardo

“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of slaves.”

—Samuel Johnson

“But I did not speak and thus became guilty myself.”

—Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“There is more than one way to burn a book.”

—Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (author’s afterword)

“Societies should not seek to regulate people’s inner thoughts, nor should they outlaw ideas however reprehensible we find them. Hate speech and hate crime laws that impose punishment or enhanced penalties for proscribed motives and viewpoints are inherently illiberal and destructive of intellectual independence and conscience.”

—Dinesh D’Souza, The End of Racism

“If you make people think they are thinking, they will love you; if you make them think, they will hate you.”

—Don Marquis

“Those who suffered from the effects of the Inquisition were not only those whose conduct gave grounds for suspicion, or whose ancestors belonged to a particular ethnic or religious minority. They comprised every inhabitant of the country—all those who had to be circumspect in speech…lest they give expression to some idea which could not bear close examination from the point of view of the excepted conventions; every writer, who had to scrutinise and rescrutinise each line before it was sent to the printer, for fear that some unguarded phrase or ill-considered witticism might cost him his liberty for months or years, or even bring upon him a worse fate.”

—Cecil Roth, The Spanish Inquisition

“Learn from science that you must doubt the experts.”

—Richard Feynman, What is Science?

“Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.”

—Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, (author’s afterword)

“The books were burned first by minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the libraries closed forever.”

—Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (author’s afterword)

“A mob’s always made up of people, no matter what.”

—Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“No one has the right to be spared sacrilege—not Jews, not Muslims, not ethnic minorities, not me, not you.”

—Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors

“Accepting this degradation of the language is the equivalent of declaring a crime legal when it has been committed often enough.”

—Theodore Bernstein

“For prying into human affairs, none are equal to those whom it does not concern.”

—Victor Hugo

“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.”

—H.L. Mencken

“He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his own enemy from oppression.”

—Thomas Paine

“So the honest man is the common enemy.”

—Honoré de Balzac, Old Goriot

“Everyone believes in virtue, but who practices it?”

—Honoré de Balzac, Old Goriot

“The battle for freedom must be won over and over again.”

—Milton Friedman

“Indeed, if the facts should disagree with the dogma, then so much worse for the facts.”

—Fred Hoyle

“Much unhappiness has come into this world because of things left unsaid.”

—Fyodor Dostoevsky

“The number of adherents is not proof of an idea’s truth or falsehood.”

—Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

“What is the basic, the essential, crucial principle that differentiates freedom from slavery? It is the principle of voluntary action versus physical coercion or compulsion.”

—Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

“There are men who find thought abnormal and unnatural…they are called morons.”

—Nathaniel Branden

“We will never know how many acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of appearing not sufficiently progressive.”

—Charles Peguy

“We will tell you what to do, as well as promise you that you are doing it of your own free will.”

—William Easterly, White Man’s Burden

“If that establishment is about anything, it’s about disguising docile conformity as courageous dissent.”

—Bruce Bawer, While Europe Slept

“Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.”

—William F. Buckley, Jr.

“The victims of cruelty or injustice are not only no better than their tormentors; they are more often than not just waiting to change places with them.”

—Kanan Makiya

“We love the sound of the future,” your audience cries. “It has everything we have always wanted.”

“So it has,” you reply, “which is why you will hate it.”

—Nick Cohen, What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way

“Nice, decent liberals were nowhere near as nice or decent as they liked to think.”

—Nick Cohen, What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way

“When we are polite, we are not honest.”

—David Halberstam, One Very Hot Day

“Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.”

—Friedrich Nietzsche

“There are few as intolerant as those who preach tolerance.”

—Anthony Browne, The Retreat of Reason

“Intellectuals are often not wiser than non-intellectuals, just better at sophistry and so better able to create such convincing specious arguments on why black is really white that they believe it themselves.”

—Anthony Browne, The Retreat of Reason

“We must come down from heights, and leave our straight paths, for the byways and low places of life, if we would learn truths by strong contrasts; and in hovels, in forecastles, and among our own outcasts in foreign lands, see what has been wrought upon our fellow-creatures by accident, hardship, or vice.”

—Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Two Years Before the Mast

“There is a clear attempt to establish truth not by scientific methods but by perpetual repetition.”

—Richard S. Lindzen

“When a true genius appears, you may know him by this sign: that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”

—Jonathan Swift

“There is no contradiction in something’s being true which everybody takes to be false.”

—Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege, Basic Laws of Arithmetic

“A soft unchallenging world would be inhabited by a soft, unchallenged race of men.”

—John Hick

“Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled.”

—Michael Crichton

“But now we have the tendency to self-censor, to be overly delicate with the words we’re using.”

—Jeff Deck and Benjamin D. Herson, The Great Typo Hunt

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”

—Oscar Wilde

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

—C.S. Lewis

“A free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the small little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.”

—George Orwell

“Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.”

—George Orwell

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

—George Orwell

“Don’t fall into the temptation of trying to please pea-brains.”

—Mustafa Kemal

“Slavery is bad even in paradise.”

—Riza Nur

“The reduction of vocabulary is used to limit dangerous thinking.”

—R. Christopher Whalen, Inflated

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

—Thomas Jefferson

“People will come to love their oppression, adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.”

—Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Cell phones have encouraged a dispersed surveillance system.”

—Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation

“Insularity is unhealthy. It gives insiders false pictures of the world and overconfidence in their opinions. It consoles them on all sides with compliant reflections.”

—Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation

“History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived; but, if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”

—Maya Angelou

“It’s not hard to find like-minded people on the Internet, no matter how small the group or how outlandish the belief.”

—Paul A. Offit, M.D., Deadly Choices

“The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.”

—Rene Descartes

“Life is the cumulative effect of a handful of significant shocks.”

—Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan

“We are dogma-prone from our mother’s wombs.”

—Simon Foucher, Dissertation on the Search for Truth

“We are swayed by the sensational. Listening to the news on the radio every hour is far worse for you than reading a weekly magazine, because the longer interval allows information to be filtered a bit.”

—Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan

“Everyone has an idea of utopia.”

—Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan

“I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.”

—Anna Quindlen

“Normally, such people [fools] exit the gene pool; academic tenure holds them a bit longer.”

—Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan

“Clearly, you cannot doubt everything and function; you cannot believe everything and survive.”

—Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan

“Sustained encounters with a small group of like-minded people almost invariably lead to the conclusion that everyone thinks the way you do.”

—Seth Mnookin, The Panic Virus

“Critical thinking requires sources with conflicting viewpoints.”

—Richard Rothstein

“There are only two kinds of scientific theories—those that have been disproved, and those that have not been disproved yet.”

—Bill Bonner, Dice Have No Memory

“Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.”

—André Gide

“A consensus by its nature will give equal weight to the opinion of an idiot.”

—Mike LaSalle

“To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects.”

—Margaret Thatcher

“It’s discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.”

—Noel Coward

“There’s nothing more debauched than thinking.”

—Wislawa Szymborska

“Fundamentalism—movement that stresses the superiority, infallibility, and authority of its beliefs in matters of faith, morals, history, and prophecy.”

—Satyajit Das, Extreme Money

“The most successful ideological effects are those which have no need of words, but ask no more than a complicitous silence.”

—Pierre Bourdieu

“Clearly there was only one escape for them—into stupidity.”

—George Orwell

“Even the devil can cite scripture for his purpose.”

—William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

“If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.”

—Albert Einstein

“The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.”

—John Kenneth Galbraith

“Humor is the ovum of dissent.”

—David Mitchel, Cloud Atlas

“They were the direct ancestors of the more saccharine Liberals of today, who yet mouth their tattered phrases and dream their preposterous dreams.”

—H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy

“They call a painter mad if he sees with eyes other than theirs.”

—Vincent Van Gogh

“Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

—George Orwell

“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone.”

—Aldous Huxley

“Wisdom itself cannot flourish, nor even truth be determined, without the give and take of debate and criticism.”

—Robert Oppenheimer

“It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.”

—Jonathan Swift

“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”

—Marcus Aurelius

“Never underestimate the difficulty of changing false beliefs by facts.”

—Henry Rosovsky

“If you torture data long enough, it will confess to anything.”

—Ronald H. Coase

“Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.”

—Aldous Huxley

“Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts.”

—Richard Feynman

“We become like those pious people who, over time, accumulate a sense of their own virtuousness so powerful as to make them believe the bad things they do are virtuous too.”

—Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong

“Laws protecting free speech mean nothing if people are too afraid to speak.”

—Christian Bommarius

“There reigned a tyranny of silence.”

—Flemming Rose, The Tyranny of Silence

“Free speech makes sense only in a society that exercises great tolerance of those with whom it disagrees.”

—Flemming Rose, The Tyranny of Silence

“What poses the greatest threat to our liberty is “insult fundamentalism.” It presupposes that feeling insulted is accompanied by a special right to react with violence, and it runs all the way through our era’s multiple efforts to impose restrictions on free speech.”

—Flemming Rose

“Thoughts cannot be made the object of government surveillance.”

—Flemming Rose, The Tyranny of Silence

“Allowing yourself to think freely and to live accordingly is wonderful. The only drawback is they put you in prison for it.”

—Lyudmila Alexeyeva

“I prefer the police to silence me rather than to do so myself.”

—Andrei Amalrik, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?

“A society is free if people have a right to express their views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm.”

—Natan Sharanasky

“Only an act can be a crime, never an idea.”

—Albert Maltz

“He who denies to another this right [free speech], makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.”

—Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason

“Free speech is more important than hurt feelings.”

—Mick Hume, Trigger Warning

“It [free speech] is about the need for people to say what they think—rather than what they think they ought to say.”

—Mick Hume, Trigger Warning

“There can be no right of free speech where any man, however lifted up, or however humble, however young, or however old, is overawed by force, and compelled to suppress his honest sentiments.”

—Frederick Douglass

“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.”

—Noam Chomsky

“There is only way to avoid criticism: Do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.”

—Aristotle

“What makes inquisitions come to an end…an eventual shortage of combustible material.”

—Unknown

“To conduct surveillance, to impose belief, to censor, to manipulate, to punish people who think differently from those in power: in the modern world the inquisitorial dynamic was more in evidence than ever, and enabled by ever more powerful instruments.”

—Cullen Murphy, God’s Jury

“A new dark age [in which] insincerity will become a virtue, lies will become truth and silence will become an existential necessity.”

—Richard Askwith

“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.”

—Kevin Alfred Strom

“What insult can be more gratuitous than the telling them what they do not want to know?”

—Samuel Butler, Erewhon

“If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.”

—General George S. Patton

“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.”

—Plato

“Silence is ultimate weapon of power.”

—Charles de Gaulle

“The freedom to hate must be as protected as the freedom to love. It is only when hate crosses over into action that the law may properly intervene.”

—Camille Paglia, Free Women Free Men

“Read widely and think for yourself. We need more dissent and less dogma.”

—Camille Paglia, Free Women Free Men

“The further a society drifts from the truth the more it will hate those who speak it.”

—Selwyn Duke

“We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”

—Charles Bukowski

“It is better to die on your feet than live on your knees.”

—Emiliano Zapata

“Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.”

—Walter Lippmann

“Minerva save us from the cloying syrup of coercive compassion!”

—Camille Paglia

“Political correctness is fascism pretending to be manners.”

—George Carlin

“The special mark of the modern world is not that it is sceptical, but that it is dogmatic without knowing it.”

—G.K. Chesterton

“As anyone who has lived under totalitarianism can attest, there is something demeaning and eventually soul-destroying about being expected to go along with claims you do not believe to be true and cannot hold to be true.”

—Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds

“Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too.”

—Heinrich Heine

“Every joke is a tiny revolution.”

—George Orwell

“Social media was invented as part of a plot to undermine the faith of sensible people in freedom of speech.”

—Michael Deacon

“If you must take care that your opinions do not differ in the least from those of the person with whom you are talking, you might just as well be alone.”

—Yoshida Kenko

“You don’t defend democracy by saying our fascists need to silence your fascists.”

—Matthew Stoller

“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.”

—Richard Feynman

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”

—Aldous Huxley

“Thus do we have the unimaginably warped dynamic in which U.S. journalists are not the defenders of free speech values but the primary crusaders to destroy them. They do it in part for power: to ensure that nobody but they can control the flow of information. The do it partly for ideology and out of hubris: the belief that their worldview is so indisputably right that all dissent is inherently dangerous “disinformation.” And they do it from petty vindictiveness: they clearly get aroused—find otherwise-elusive purpose—by destroying people’s reputations and lives, no matter how powerless. Whatever the motive, corporate media employees whose company title is “journalist” are the primary activists against a free and open internet and core values of free thought.”

—Glenn Greenwald

“All you need to make a tyrant is a single bend of the knee.”

—Mourid Barghouti

“Blasphemy is a right, not a crime.”

—Leo Igwe

“Being offended is the natural consequence of leaving one’s home.”

—Fran Leibowitz

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.”

—Voltaire

“Political correctness is the elevation of sensitivity over truth.”

—Bill Maher

“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.”

—Confucius

“A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to.”

—Laurence J. Peter

“The censor is the bulwark of tyrants.”

—Heather Mac Donald, The Diversity Delusion

“We realize the importance of our voice only when we are silenced.”

—Malala Yousafzai

“You must understand that there is more than one path to the top of the mountain.”

—Miyamoto Musashi

“Truth is not what you want it to be; it is what it is, and you must bend to its power or live a lie.”

—Miyamoto Musashi

“A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”

—John F. Kennedy

“All censorship exists to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions.”

—George Bernard Shaw

“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.”

—Noam Chomsky

“An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.”

—Oscar Wilde

“Without debate, without criticism no administration and no country can succeed and no republic survive.”

—John F. Kennedy

“Give me six lines written by the most honest man in the world, and I will find enough in them to hang him.”

—Attributed to Cardinal Richelieu

“Freedom is unlikely to be lost all at once. It is far more likely to be eroded away bit by bit amid glittering promises and expressions of noble ideas.”

—Thomas Sowell

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”

—Oscar Wilde

“Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you’re going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed.”

—Dwight D. Eisenhower

“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”

—John Milton

“Nobody can be said to have attained the pinnacle of Truth until a thousand sincere people have denounced him for blasphemy.”

—Anthony de Mello

“A consensus means that everyone agrees to say collectively what no one believes individually.”

—Abba Eban

“I could suddenly see the beastly horror and terrible consequences of engineered divisions and cultivated hostility.”

—Amartya Sen

“The lion never loses sleep over the opinions of sheep.”

—Unknown

“I wish that someday we will be able to call things by their proper names, as courageous people do.”

—Tadeusz Borowski, Here in Our Auschwitz

“A warning: your every conversation is overheard, noted, and reported to the proper authorities.”

—Tadeusz Borowski, Here in Our Auschwitz

“When they boasted of their ignorance, I thought immediately about gas chambers.”

—Tadeusz Borowski, Here in Our Auschwitz

“Under political correctness, saying the right thing supplants doing the right thing.”

—Michael Knowles, Speechless

“It is one thing for the common use of words to shift organically over time…It is another thing, however—and an inherently malevolent thing—to deliberately and dishonestly manipulate and distort meanings so as to manipulate listeners or readers and alter reality.”

—Quin Hillyer

“Any ideology whose adherents don’t tolerate critique is a Religion.”

—Brittany Roux

“Everyone appreciates your honesty, until you’re honest with them, then you’re an asshole.”

—George Carlin

“No point in ignoring the truth. Doesn’t make it worse to have it said out loud.”

—Stephenie Meyer, The Host

“There are no dangerous thoughts for the simple reason that thinking itself is such a dangerous enterprise.”

—Hannah Arendt

“People who would hamper free speech always make the mistake of assuming that they are designing a world in which only their enemies will be forced to shut up.”