Jay Tse > Jay's Quotes

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.”
― Salman Rushdie

“Everyone is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people's idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage.”
― Winston Churchill

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”
― Daniel Patrick Moynihan

“Ultimately, arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.”
― Edward Snowden

“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, Mrs. Warren's Profession

“Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re really in favor of free speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of free speech.”
― Noam Chomsky

“The state can't give you free speech, and the state can't take it away. You're born with it, like your eyes, like your ears. Freedom is something you assume, then you wait for someone to try to take it away. The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free...”
― Utah Phillips

“When widely followed public figures feel free to say anything, without any fact-checking, it becomes impossible for a democracy to think intelligently about big issues.”
― Thomas L. Friedman

“We live in a world in which people are censured, demoted, imprisoned, beheaded, simply because they have opened their mouths, flapped their lips, and vibrated some air. Yes, those vibrations can make us feel sad or stupid or alienated. Tough shit. That's the price of admission to the marketplace of ideas. Hateful, blasphemous, prejudiced, vulgar, rude, or ignorant remarks are the music of a free society, and the relentless patter of idiots is how we know we're in one. When all the words in our public conversation are fair, good, and true, it's time to make a run for the fence.”
― Daniel Gilbert

“I was astonished, bewildered. This was America, a country where, whatever its faults, people could speak, write, assemble, demonstrate without fear. It was in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. We were a democracy...

But I knew it wasn't a dream; there was a painful lump on the side of my head...

The state and its police were not neutral referees in a society of contending interests. They were on the side of the rich and powerful. Free speech? Try it and the police will be there with their horses, their clubs, their guns, to stop you.

From that moment on, I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country--not just the existence of poverty amidst great wealth, not just the horrible treatment of black people, but something rotten at the root. The situation required not just a new president or new laws, but an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of a new kind of society--cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one's thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. They know its power. Thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers, founded in injustice and wrong, are sure to tremble, if men are allowed to reason.”
― Frederick Douglass, Selected Addresses of Frederick Douglass:

“When society gives censors wide and vague powers they never confine themselves to deserving targets. They are not snipers, but machine-gunners. Allow them to fire at will, and they will hit anything that moves.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“That said, the question remains: how to strike the balance between free speech and mutual respect in this mixed-up world, both blessed and cursed with instant communication? We should not fight fire with fire, threats with threats.”
― Timothy Garton Ash

“Noviolence 2.0 (The Sonnet)

Nonviolence is not absence of violence,
Nonviolence is control over violence.
Justice doesn't mean absence of injustice,
Justice means absence of indifference.
Liberty doesn’t mean total lack of limits,
Liberty means to practice self-regulation.
Free speech doesn't mean reckless speech,
Free speech means speaking for ascension.
Order does not mean absence of chaos,
Order means presence of accountability.
Peace does not mean absence of conflicts,
Real peace comes from elimination of bigotry.
No more nonchalant nonviolence, it's a coward's way!
Awake, arise ‘n humanize, or in tomb the world will lay.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Dervish Advaitam: Gospel of Sacred Feminines and Holy Fathers

“Being offended is an emotional state, not a substantive argument; we cannot afford to give it the power to stifle debate.”
― Greg Lukianoff, Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate

“...those in power often invoke civility to punish speech they dislike, but overlook the equally acid-tongued statements that are in agreement with their own assumptions.”
― Greg Lukianoff, Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate

“There will always be those whose instinct inclines towards submission to authority, who are happy to shift beliefs in accordance with the fashion or decrees from above. Orwell called this the 'gramophone mind', content to play the record of the moment whether or not one is in agreement”
― Andrew Doyle, Free Speech And Why It Matters

“Most of my opinions are not as informed and well rounded as I would like. I have to be humble enough to accept that I don’t know enough. If my goal is to understand something true, then being challenged is a good thing. We need to be challenged occasionally and to get out of the echo chamber that is your own philosophical group or your own confirmation biased mind. The alternative is to only be able to hear one narrative and for those who oppose that narrative to be silenced, or to have uncivil debate by two polar opposite opinions. Truth is usually found to be hidden in a field of nuance and, as Albert Maysles said, “Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance.”
― Eric Overby, Legacy

“You win a debate with a better argument, not by force.”
― Frank Sonnenberg, Listen to Your Conscience: That's Why You Have One

“Free speech is a fundamental foundation of a free and fair democracy. But let’s be honest and have the guts to unpick who gets to speak, where, and why. The real test of this country’s perimeters of freedom of speech will be found if or when a person can freely discuss racism without being subject to intellectually dishonest attempts to undermine their arguments. If free speech, as so many insist, includes being prepared to hear opinions that you don’t like, then let’s open up the parameters of what we consider acceptable debate. I don’t mean new versions of old bigotry. I mean, that if we have to listen to this kind of bigotry, then let us have the equal and opposite viewpoint. If Katie Hopkins, with help from the Sun newspaper, publishes a column describing desperate refugees trying to travel to Britain as cockroaches, then we need a cultural commentator that advocates for true compassion and total open borders. Not the kind of wishy-washy liberalism that harps on about the cultural and economic contributions of migrants to this country as though they are resources to be sucked dry, but someone who speaks in favour of migrants and open borders with the same force of will with which Hopkins despises them.”
― Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race

“It is not a triumph of opinion when people are made too afraid to express a contrary one.”
― A.I. Fabler

“It struck me that there is a reason James Madison put freedom of speech and freedom of the press in the very first amendment. If we can't speak out, if we cannot challenge those in power, there is no guaranteeing the rights that follow.”
― Jonathan Karl, Front Row at the Trump Show

“There are two ways to choke off free expression. We've already discussed one of them: clamp down on free speech and declare some topics off-limits. That strategy is straightforward enough. The other, more insidious way to limit free expression is to try to change the very language people use.”
― Dennis Prager, No Safe Spaces

“Anything worth fighting for requires us to be willing to suffer to protect it.”
― C.A.A. Savastano

“Too little freedom is captivity, too much freedom is chaos.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“If people can't control their emotions they need to stop trying to control other people's behavior”
― Robin Skinner

“Humans don't really like freedom of speech," Lukianoff told them, "they like to say they like it. And they definitely like their won freedom of speech. They don't necessarily like your freedom of speech that much”
― Dennis Prager, No Safe Spaces

“If you want to have everybody agreeing with you, join a club or program or church that agrees with you.”
― Dennis Prager, No Safe Spaces

“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.”
― Kevin Alfred Strom