Quotes About Speech

Talking hurts the way hurting doesn't.

In matters of the national interest, silence is not golden; it's yellow.

I am a passionate believer in freedom of speech. I would not support anything which would impinge on aggressive robust freedom of the British press, but when things go wrong and there has been outright illegality, there should be proper accountability.

Identity politics contains a trap. Of all the reasons to be wary of religious leaders asking the state to suspend freedom of speech to spare their tender feelings, not the smallest is that selective censorship leaves liberals with no argument against sectarians from the dominant denomination or ethnic group.

Michel Foucault believed that speech was truly free only when the weak took a risk and used it against the strong: 'In parrhesia, the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy.

Western democracies managed to fight without imposing restrictions on freedom of speech. Instead of Orwell's 'war atmosphere', there was an anti-war atmosphere.

Citizens exercised parrhesia, which translates as 'all speech', or sometimes 'true speech'.

hierarchical cultures of business and the state, where status determines access to information, and criticism is met with punishment. Nearly all of us work in hierarchies. Nearly all of us bite our tongues when we should speak freely. Yet few of the classic or modern texts on freedom of speech discuss freedom of speech at work, even though, as the crash of 2008 showed, self-censorship in the workplace can be as great a threat to national security as foreign enemies are.

The crash of 2008 ought to have thrown a bucket of cold water over the excited futurologists. Open societies suffered far more than closed regimes. A member of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party was entitled to wonder why Americans were telling him he must allow free speech when China was booming and the First Amendment had not stopped debt-laden America going through a deep recession.

American Supreme Court intervened, and its decision in the 1964 case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan is one of those rare moments in history when freedom of speech made an unequivocal advance.

Would they defend free speech in murderous times? Or would they hold their tongues and accept that they must 'respect' views they knew to be false?

The law should restrict itself to punishing speech that directly provokes crime – incitement to murder, incitement to violence or incitement to arson. It should not punish incitement to hatred, because it is not a crime to hate people, any more than it is to envy them or to lust after them.

Never say the dangerous thing aloud.

She could speak if she chose, but she was not ready to choose because she did not understand.

Aud rhymes with cowed.

Aud rhymes with shroud.

To hear you talk is like hearing him talk when he first become king.

Voor de democraat staat vrijheid niet gelijk aan alles kunnen zeggen wat je denkt, maar aan niet over alles hoeven nadenken wat je zegt.

Preserving freedom of speech maximizes the chance of truth emerging from its collision with error and half-truth.

Free speech is one of the core values in a democracy and it should be championed with a vengeance.

One reason why false and offensive speech is permitted in most liberal democracies is precisely because the best answer to bad speech is good speech, rather than censorship.

Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev

However stupid a fool's words may be, they are sometimes enough to confound an intelligent man.

A word aptly uttered or written cannot be cut away by an axe.