A Quote by Louis D. Brandeis

Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly.

Louis D. Brandeis

Quote Topics

Alone Assembly Cannot Fear Free Free Speech Injury Justify Not Alone Serious Speech Suppression

Quote Author

Louis D. Brandeis
American - Judge
November 13, 1856 - October 5, 1941

Fear of serious injury alone cannot justify oppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.

Louis D. Brandeis

Advocates of 'free speech' often repeat the mantra that the best response to bad speech is more and better speech, not the suppression of the bad stuff.

Jackson Katz

Free speech, free press, free religion, the right of free assembly, yes, the right of petition... well, they are still radical ideas.

Lyndon B. Johnson

The greater the importance to safeguarding the community from incitements to the overthrow of our institutions by force and violence, the more imperative is the need to preserve the constitutional rights of free speech, free press and free assembly in order to maintain the opportunity for free political discussion.

Charles Evans Hughes

I prefer a little free speech to no free speech at all; but how many have free speech or the chance or the mind for it; and is not free speech here as elsewhere clamped down on in ratio of its freedom and danger?

James Agee

It's always easy to get people to condemn threats to free speech when the speech being threatened is speech that they like. It's much more difficult to induce support for free speech rights when the speech being punished is speech they find repellent.

Glenn Greenwald

During the last dozen years the tales of suppression of free assemblage, free press, and free speech, by local authorities or the State operating under martial law have been so numerous as to have become an old story. They are attacked at the instigation of an economically and socially powerful class, itself enjoying to the full the advantages of free communications, but bent on denying them to the class it holds within its power.

Edward Alsworth Ross

New York Times v. Sullivan was about the suppression of speech in the South [during the 1960s]. Today's version of suppression is just another verse of the same song.

Gilbert S. Merritt, Jr.

Democratization is not democracy; it is a slogan for the temporary liberalization handed down from an autocrat. Glasnost is not free speech; only free speech, constitutionally guaranteed, is free speech.

Gail Sheehy

Men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.

Niccolo Machiavelli

Without free speech no search for Truth is possible; without free speech no discovery of Truth is useful; without free speech progress is checked, and the nations no longer march forward towards the nobler life which the future holds for man. 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

The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy. One's right to life, liberty and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly may not be submitted to vote; they depend on no elections.

Robert H. Jackson

I believe there is a limit beyond which free speech cannot go, but it's a limit that's very seldom mentioned. It's the point where free speech begins to collide with the right to privacy. I don't think there are any other conditions to free speech. I've got a right to say and believe anything I please, but I haven't got a right to press it on anybody else. .... Nobody's got a right to be a nuisance to his neighbors.

H. L. Mencken

The political function of 'the right of free speech' is to protect dissenters and unpopular minorities from forcible suppression - not to guarantee them the support, advantages, and rewards of a popularity they have not gained.