OT: Reflecting on Freedom of Speech

So Blessed!
on 9/29/11 5:22 am

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

~Noam Chomsky

So Blessed!
on 9/29/11 5:24 am

Every human being has a right to hear what other wise human beings have spoken to him. It is one of the Rights of Men; a very cruel injustice if you deny it to a man!

~Thomas Carlyle

So Blessed!
on 9/29/11 5:25 am

We have a natural right to make use of our pens as of our tongue, at our peril, risk and hazard.

~Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique, 1764

So Blessed!
on 9/29/11 5:26 am

A people which is able to say everything becomes able to do everything.

~ Napoleon Bonaparte

So Blessed!
on 9/29/11 5:31 am

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

~John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859

So Blessed!
on 9/29/11 5:34 am

The victim culture, every sufferer grasping for their own Holocaust, ensures that anyone who feels offended can call for moderation, for dilution, and in the end, as is all too often the case, for censorship. And censorship, that by-product of fear - stemming as it does not from some positive agenda, but from the desire to escape our own terrors and superstitions by imposing them on others - must surely be resisted.
~Jonathon Green

goodkel
on 9/29/11 9:45 am

DS on 08/20/07

On September 29, 2011 at 12:34 PM Pacific Time, So Blessed! wrote:

The victim culture, every sufferer grasping for their own Holocaust, ensures that anyone who feels offended can call for moderation, for dilution, and in the end, as is all too often the case, for censorship. And censorship, that by-product of fear - stemming as it does not from some positive agenda, but from the desire to escape our own terrors and superstitions by imposing them on others - must surely be resisted.
~Jonathon Green

My personal favorite!

GREAT thread!