Jacob Mchangama > Quotes

“Eleanor Roosevelt’s prescient warning that prohibiting incitement to hatred under international human rights law “would encourage governments to punish all criticism under the guise of protecting against religious or national hostility” has been forgotten.
--Jacob Mchangama, Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media”
― Jacob Mchangama

“Lost in the incessant focus on the darker sides of free speech—real, perceived, and exaggerated—are the profound benefits of free and open discourse, from the toppling of absolutist rulers to the cross-fertilization of knowledge across cultures and the defeat of institutional racism and discrimination. As thinkers like Spinoza, Cato, Madison, Constant, and Douglass have pointed out, we jeopardize those benefits if we are unwilling to accept any of the harms or costs that inevitably accompany free expression.”
― Jacob Mchangama, Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media