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

~ Noam Chomsky

“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

“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”

~ Harry S. Truman

“Free societies…are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom’s existence.”

~ Salman Rushdie

“Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it.”

~ Mark Twain

“Censorship is advertising paid by the government.”

~ Federico Fellini

“You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.”

~ John Morley

“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

“All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.”

~ George Bernard Shaw

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

~ The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.