"If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
- George Orwell (The Freedom of the Press)
- George Orwell (The Freedom of the Press)
"If you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you."
- George Orwell (The Freedom of the Press)
"Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you're really in favor of free speech, then you're in favor of freedom of speech for precisely for views you despise. Otherwise, you're not in favor of free speech."
- Noam Chomsky
"Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party – however numerous they may be – is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept of 'justice' but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when 'freedom' becomes a special privilege."
- Rosa Luxemburg (The Russian Revolution)
"The public life of countries with limited freedom is so poverty-stricken, so miserable, so rigid, so unfruitful, precisely because, through the exclusion of democracy, it cuts off the living sources of all spiritual riches and progress... The only way to a rebirth is the school of public life itself, the most unlimited, the broadest democracy and public opinion... Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element. Public life gradually falls asleep"
- Rosa Luxemburg (The Russian Revolution)
"Freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it"
- Karl Marx (Critique of the Gotha Programme)
"So soon as you make a declaration on paper that speech shall be free, you will have a hundred lawyers proving that 'freedom does not mean abuse, nor liberty license'; and they will define and define freedom out of existence. Let the guarantee of free speech be in every man's determination to use it, and we shall have no need of paper declarations. On the other hand, so long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men."
- Voltairine de Cleyre (Anarchism & American Traditions)
"The simple step of a simple courageous man is not to partake in falsehood, not to support false actions... One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world."
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Nobel Lecture)
"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
"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but 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 (God in the Dock)
"It is indeed probable that more harm and misery have been caused by men determined to use coercion to stamp out a moral evil than by men intent on doing evil."
- Friedrich Hayek (The Constitution of Liberty)
"It is not who governs but what government is entitled to do that seems to me the essential problem."
- Friedrich Hayek (The Constitution of Liberty)
"The idea of any hierarchical politico deciding what a man or woman is allowed to write to fit a proscribed national agenda is a horrid thing."
- David Adams Richards (Speech in the Canadian Senate)
- David Adams Richards (Speech in the Canadian Senate)
"If you aren't careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing."
- Malcolm X
"Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion."
- Oscar Wilde (The Soul of Man Under Socialism)