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.
Man is a culture, nothing but a culture! Question your culture! Just like monkeys picking lice from their skin, get rid of the stupidities in your culture!
A well-functioning democracy has a culture of free speech, not simply legal protection of free speech. It encourages independence of mind. It imparts a willingness to challenge prevailing opinion through both words and deeds. Equally important, it encourages a certain set of attitudes in listeners, one that gives a respectful hearing to those who do not embrace the conventional wisdom. In a culture of free speech, the attitude of listeners is no less important than that of speakers.
...culture is useless unless it is constantly challenged by counter culture. People create culture; culture creates people. It is a two-way street. When people hide behind a culture, you know that's a dead culture.
People have come to me over the years and said to me: 'I admire the culture of Starbucks. Can you come give a speech and help us turn our culture around?' I wish it were that easy. Turning a culture around is very difficult to do because it's based on a series of many, many decisions, and the organization is framed by those decisions.
If you're offended, what the Supreme Court has said the answer to speech you do not like is not less speech, it's more speech. There are many people in America who don't get that.
Most of my columns at National Review focus on PC culture, and sometimes, when I write about some idiotic, anti-free-speech idea presented by some idiotic, anti-free-speech student or professor, people will ask me why I wasted my time writing about it.
We must not fall into the trap of thinking speech that offends is speech that must be forbidden. A healthy culture demands that much of us, to equip the next generation of Americans with the knowledge and reason they will need to confront an uncertain future.
Blackface remains exoticist and offensive as a practice, not just because of its long tradition of being used to mock black selfhood, sexuality, and speech but because of its assertion that black people are merely white people sullied by dark skin.
Very often in free speech cases you find yourself defending material that you personally detest, because of course it's no trick to defend the free speech of people you either agree with or who don't particularly upset you. It's when people really upset you that you discover if you believe in free speech or not.
In cyberspace, people with different skin colors, nationalities, cultures and languages should be equally entitled to participation, free speech and development. We should abandon prejudices, respect differences, and be tolerant and open.
If a university official's letter accusing a speaker of having a proclivity to commit speech crimes before she's given the speech - which then leads to Facebook postings demanding that Ann Coulter be hurt, a massive riot and a police-ordered cancellation of the speech - is not hate speech, then there is no such thing as hate speech.
We're right to say that a culture that can't tolerate free speech is... there are a wide range of positive human experiences that are not available in that culture. And we're right to want those experiences.
You can't be selective about freedom of speech. If you say you believe in freedom of speech you have to acknowledge the people whose views you disagree with, people whose views you may detest, nevertheless have the right to freedom of speech.
'We Are Pop Culture' is my clothing line for women that started with just T-shirts. The clothing line is urban street wear. It's for women that feel confident in their own skin and want to express themselves. The whole idea is to play with modern pop culture and previous pop culture using art and sayings.
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.