Note: This story was dynamically reformatted for online reading convenience.
 
 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

   * END *