Author: AMERICAN FOUNDERS, US PRESIDENTS, SUPREME COURT JUSTICES, RESPECTED AUTHORS, AND INTERNATIONAL STATESMEN. 
Title: QUOTATIONS BY AMERICAN FOUNDERS, US PRESIDENTS, SUPREME COURT JUSTICES, RESPECTED AUTHORS, AND INTERNATIONAL STATESMEN, DENOTING THE SPIRIT OF FREEDOM OF SPEECH EMBODIED IN THE US CONSTITUTION AND THE CONSTITUTION ACT OF CANADA (THE CANADA ACT)
Universe: Freedom of Speech 
Summary: Evidence of the spirit of the Constitutional protections of freedom of speech. 
Language: english

"Our liberty depends on freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost."--Thomas Jefferson

"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

"Better a thousandfold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech.  The abuse dies in a day, but the denial stays the life of the people, and entombs the hope of the race."--Charles Bradlaugh

"Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself."--Potter Stewart

"Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men and I will find in them an excuse to hang him."--Cardinal Richelieu

"If all mankind but one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would no be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind...we can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still."--John Stuart Mill

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."--The Friends Of Voltaire, 1906

"Only the suppressed word is dangerous."--Ludwig Borne

"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression, for if he violates this duty, he established a precedent that will reach to himself."--Thomas Paine

"The censure of those who are opposed to us, is the highest commendation that can be given us."--Seigneur De Saint-Evremond

"Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters.  Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard."--Felix Frankfurter

"Mere unorthodoxy or dissent from the prevailing mores is not to be condemned.  The absence of such voices would be a symptom of grave illness in our society."--Earl Warren

"Thought that is silenced is always rebellious."--Alan Barth

"In a number of cases, dissenting opinions have become the law."--Charles Evans Hughes

"Freedom rings where opinions clash."--Adalai E. Stevenson

"If you can't ignore an insult, top it; if you can't top it, laugh it off; and if you can't laugh it off, it's probably deserved."--Russell Lynes

"A radical is one who speaks the truth."--Charles A. Lindbergh

"There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book.  Books are well written, or badly written.  That is all."--Oscar Wilde

"Children have a lot more to worry about from the parents who raised them than from the books they read."--E.L. Doctorow

"A wise and frugal government which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouths of labor the bread it has earned, this is the sum of good government."--Thomas Jefferson

"The Greatest evils inflicted by man over the face of the Earth are wrought not by the self-seekers, the pleasure lovers, or the merely amoral, but by the fervent devotees of ethical principles."--Robert M. MacIver

"While men usually recognize criminal acts when they are committed by an individual in the name of his own interest, they often fail to recognize the very same acts for what they are when they are committed by some large gang in the name of 'social justice' or the 'common good'."--Jarrett Wollstein, Society Without Coercion

"The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.  His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.  He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise or even right.  These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but nor for compelling him or visiting him with any evil in case he do otherwise.  To justify that, the conduct from which it is desired to deter him must be calculated to produce evil to someone else.  The only part of the conduct of anyone for which he is amenable to society is that which concerns others.  In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute.  Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign."--John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

"I consider trial by jury as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution."--Thomas Jefferson

"Laws that prevent the choosing of sin also prevent the choosing of virtue."--Daniel B. Klein

"Conscience is a higher source of authority than obedience to the law."--Judges at Nuremberg

"The strength of the Constitution lies entirely in the determination of each citizen to defend it.  Only if every single citizen feels duty bound to do his share in this defense are the constitutional rights secure."--Albert Einstein

"If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable."--Louis D. Brandeis

"The pages of history shine on instances of the jury's exercise of its prerogative to disregard instructions of the judge..."--U.S. v. Dougherty

"The jury has a right to judge both the law as well as the facts in controversy."--John Jay, 1789, first Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court

"For more than six hundred years--that is, since Magna Carta, in 1215, there has been no clearer principle of English or American constitutional law, than in criminal cases, it is not only the right and duty of juries to judge what are the facts, what is the law, and what was the moral intent of the accused; but that it is also their right, and their primary and paramount duty, to judge the justice of the law, and hold all laws invalid, that are, in their opinion, unjust or oppressive, and all persons guiltless in violating, or resisting the execution of such laws."--Lysander Spooner, 1852

"If a juror accepts as the law that which the judge states, then that juror has accepted the absolute authority of a government employee and has surrendered a power and right that was once the citizen's safeguard of liberty."-- 2 Elliots Debates, 94, Bancroft, History of the Constitution, 267

"All laws which are repugnant to the Constitution are null and void."--Marbury v. Madison (5 US 137 [1803])

"If a juror feels that the statute involved in any criminal case being tried is unfair, or that it infringes upon the defendant's natural, inalienable, or Constitutional rights, then it is his duty to affirm that the offending statute is really no law at all and that the violation of it is no crime at all--for no one is bound to obey an unjust law...the law itself is on trial, quite as much as the cause which is to be decided."--Harlan F. Stone, former Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court

"It is not only the juror's right, but his duty, in that case, to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court."--John Adams, 1771

"To do injustice is more disgraceful than to suffer it."--Plato

"Liberty cannot be sacrificed for the sake of anything."--Robert G. Ingersoll

"No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent."--Abraham Lincoln

"Liberty is the only thing you can't have unless you give it to others."--William Allan White

"The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self protection."--John Stuart Mill

"In a free society, the state does not administer the affairs of men.  It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs."--Walter Lippman, An Inquiry into the Principles of a Free Society

"I know not what course others may take; but as for myself, give me liberty, or give me death."--Patrick Henry

"Anyone entrusted with power will abuse it if not also animated with the love of truth and virtue."--Jean De La Fontaine

"Those who have been once intoxicated with power, and have derived any kind of emolument from it, even thought it be but for one year, can never willingly abandon it."--Edmund Burke

"Commandment number one of any truly civilized society is this: let people be different."--David Grayson

"Remember always that you have not only the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one."--Eleanor Roosevelt

"Tolerance is the greatest gift of the mind."--Helen Keller

"If I do not want what you want, please try not to tell me that my want is wrong.  Or if I believe other than you, at least pause before you correct my view.  Or if my emotion is less than yours, or more, given the same circumstances, try not to ask me to feel more strongly or weakly.  Or yet if I act, or fail to act in a manner of your design for action, let me be me.  I do not, for the moment at least, ask you to understand me.  That will come only when you are willing to give up changing me into a copy of you.  If you will allow me any of my own wants, or emotions, or beliefs, or actions, then you open yourself, so that some day these things of mine might not seem so wrong, and might finally appear to you as right--for me.  And in understanding me you might come to prize my differences from you, and even preserve and nurture those differences."--Keirsey & Bates, Please Understand Me

"No government has ever been beneficent when the attitude of the government was that it was taking care of the people."--Woodrow Wilson

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."--Benjamin Franklin

"What is right is not always popular, what is popular is not always right."--Daniel Webster

"If the principle were to prevail of a common law [i.e. a national government] being in force in the United States...it would become the most corrupt government on the earth."--Thomas Jefferson

"Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny."--Edmund Burke

"When all government, domestic and foreign, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power, it will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we are separated."--Thomas Jefferson, 1821

"There are now a quarter of a billion Americans.  A quarter of a billion.  One percent is 2 1/2 million people.  One tenth of one percent is 250,000 people.  One thousandth of one percent is 2,500 people.  With those numbers, our society cannot help but be a bunch of alternate universes; every behavior, every statistical anomaly, should show up in some one of those one-thousandth-of-one-percent-segments.  Why should we be shocked when we see aberrant behavior in the news?  The probability of any one person doing that is extremely low, but the probability of some one doing it is extremely high.  And why should we take that behavior and try to generalize it to all of society?  Talk about risk factors.  A one-thousandth-of-one-percent chance that something bad will happen seems minuscule-until you realize that 2,500 real persons will be affected.  One of those could be you.  Or worse, me.  But we should not be surprised."--Jeffrey G. Liss

"The vice lies not in entering the bordello but in not coming out."--Aristippus

"A life consisting exclusively of things that are Good For You is bad for you."--Kelvin Throop, Analog

"The public must recognize that a risk-free society is not only impossible, but intolerably expensive."--Daniel E. Koshland, Jr. (Ed., Science, 4 July 1989)

"I'm frustrated by your apathy."--Alanis Morissette, All I Really Want

"That so few dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of our time."--John Stuart Mill

"It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue."--Voltaire

"Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have."--Harry Emerson Fosdick

"To seek out the best through the whole Union we must resort to other information, which, from the best of men, acting disinterestedly and with the purest of motives, is sometimes incorrect."--Thomas Jefferson

"I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves, and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion."--Thomas Jefferson

"If a nation expects to be both ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."--Thomas Jefferson

"Moderation in temper is always a virtue, but moderation in principle is always a vice."--Thomas Paine

"Any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it."--Henry David Thoreau

"Politicians are interested in people.  Not that this is always a virtue.  Fleas are interested in dogs."--P.J. O'Rourke

"Democracy is three wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch."--Freedom Slogan

"Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority."--Thomas Huxley

"Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either."--Gore Vidal

"It is given a man, sir, to attack the rights of others, seize their goods, assault the lives of those who defend their nationality, make of their virtues crimes, and of one's own vices a virtue, but there is one thing beyond the reach of such perversity: the tremendous judgment of history."--Benito Juarez, President of the Republic of Mexico

"Bribery must stop, you say?  Tell it to Schindler."--Daniel B. Klein

"Our free trade plan is quite simple.  We say that every [citizen] shall have the right to buy whatever he wants, wherever he wants, at his own good pleasure, without restriction or discouragement from the state."--Winston Churchill

"Liberty is independence backed by force."--Voltaire

"Discipline must come through liberty."--Maria Montessori

"No man is free who is not a master of himself."--Epictetus

"Good government is no substitute for self-government."--Mahatma Gandhi

"The best of all governments is that which teaches us to govern ourselves."--Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

"Liberty means responsibility.  That is why most men dread it."--George Bernard Shaw

"The follies a man regrets most in his life are those which he didn't commit when he had the opportunity."--Helen Rowland

"The great majority of those who speak of perfectibility as a dream, do so because they feel that it is one which would afford them no pleasure if it were realized."--John Stuart Mill

"Is it the will to control that gives birth to the pretense of knowing, or is it the will to know that gives birth to the impulse to control?"--Daniel B. Klein

"I reckon most folks are just as happy as they make up their minds to be."--Abraham Lincoln

"The value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the (person) who expresses it."--Oscar Wilde

"A man's greatness can be measured by his enemies."--Don Platt

"No man has a right in America to treat another man 'tolerantly' for tolerance is the assumption of superiority.  Our liberties are equal rights of every citizen."--Wendell Willkie

"An observer will see the bizarre developments of behavior only in alien cultures, not his own.  Nevertheless this is obviously a local and temporary bias.  There is no reason to suppose that any one culture has seized upon an eternal sanity and will stand in history as a solitary solution of the human problem.  Even the next generation knows better.  Our only scientific course is to consider our own culture, so far as we are able, as one example among innumerable others of the variant configurations of human culture."--Ruth Benedict

"The public is wonderfully tolerant.  It forgives everything except genius."--Oscar Wilde

"To take away an individual's respect and dignity is to make a truly dangerous enemy."--Bob Craycroft

"In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual."--Galileo Galilei

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