BY Table of Contents
Free speech is the proposition that a society is better off when its citizens are allowed to say what they actually think, even when what they think is wrong, offensive, or dangerous to existing power. The argument is older than the United States; the First Amendment is one of the cleaner formal expressions of it, but the underlying case was made by Mill in 1859, by Voltaire’s defenders in the eighteenth century, and by every dissenter who ever risked his life to publish something a government wanted suppressed.
The serious case for free speech rests on three observations. The first is the foundation argument: a society that cannot publicly air its disagreements has no way to correct itself, and a citizenry that cannot speak freely has no way to participate in self-government. The second is the harder version: the test of free speech is not whether you defend speech you agree with – that’s free agreement – but whether you defend the speech you hate. The third is structural: free speech requires constitutional and cultural architecture (court doctrine, press protections, social norms against mob enforcement) that takes generations to build and a single generation to lose.
The quotes below are organized around four questions: what does it mean to call free speech the foundation of a free society, what does it actually require to defend speech you hate, what is the constitutional architecture that makes free speech operational, and what do the modern forms of censorship – political correctness, deplatforming, the chilling effect of cultural enforcement – actually look like.
Free Speech as the Foundation of a Free Society
“Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such thing as Wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty, without Freedom of Speech.”
- Benjamin Franklin, Silence Dogood, No. 8 (The New-England Courant, July 9, 1722)
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
- George Orwell, The Freedom of the Press (unused preface to Animal Farm, 1945)
“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
- Evelyn Beatrice Hall, The Friends of Voltaire (1906) – widely misattributed to Voltaire
“Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.”
– Salman Rushdie
“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Winston's diary
“To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.”
- Frederick Douglass, A Plea for Free Speech in Boston (December 1860)
“The freedom of Speech may be taken away, and, dumb and silent, we may be led, like sheep, to the Slaughter.”
- George Washington, Address to the Officers of the Army, March 15, 1783
“Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.”
- Benjamin Franklin, Silence Dogood, No. 8 (1722)
“Proclaim the truth and do not be silent through fear.”
– St. Catherine of Siena
“This is slavery, not to speak one’s thought.”
- Euripides, The Phoenician Women
Defending the Speech You Hate
“We (as a society) have to be committed to defending free speech however impolitic, or unpopular, or even wrong because defending that is the only barrier to violence. That’s because the only way we can influence one another short of physical violence is thru speech, thru communicating ideas. The moment you say certain ideas can’t be communicated you create a circumstance where people have no alternative but to go hands on you.”
- Sam Harris, Making Sense Podcast #67: Meaning and Chaos
“If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.”
- Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988)
“Those who call for censorship in the name of the oppressed ought to recognize it is never the oppressed who determine the bounds of censorship.”
- Aryeh Neier, Defending My Enemy (1979)
“Because if you don’t stand up for the stuff you don’t like, when they come for the stuff you do like, you’ve already lost.”
- Neil Gaiman, Why defend freedom of icky speech (blog post, 2008)
The Constitutional Architecture
“The remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”
- Louis Brandeis, Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357 (1927), concurring opinion
“A popular government, without popular information… is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy.”
- James Madison, Letter to W. T. Barry, August 4, 1822
“Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.”
- Hugo Black, New York Times Co. v. United States (Pentagon Papers, 1971)
“If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation… it is that no official… can prescribe what shall be orthodox.”
- Robert H. Jackson, West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943)
“The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected… because speech is the beginning of thought.”
- Anthony M. Kennedy, Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition (2002)
Censorship in the Modern Forms
“Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it.”
– Mark Twain
“I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism.”
- P. D. James, P.D. James
“There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running around with lit matches.”
- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (50th Anniversary Edition, Coda)
“Political correctness is tyranny; just tyranny with manners.”
- Charlton Heston, Address to the Harvard Law School Forum, February 16, 1999
“If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech – even if the law forbids it.”
- George Orwell, The Freedom of the Press (1945)
“The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information.”
- Henry A. Wallace, The Danger of American Fascism, New York Times, April 9, 1944
Final Thoughts
Three short reads anchor the case. John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, Chapter 2 (1859, free at Gutenberg) is still the cleanest philosophical case ever made for why even an idea everyone agrees is wrong has to be allowed to be expressed. George Orwell’s The Freedom of the Press (1945, free online) is the unused preface to Animal Farm – the report from inside the wartime British press of how voluntary self-censorship works in a country that thinks of itself as free. And Aryeh Neier’s Defending My Enemy (1979) is the autobiography of the Jewish ACLU lawyer who argued for the Nazis’ right to march in Skokie, Illinois – and who understood, better than most of his critics, that a right you will not defend for your enemy is not a right at all.
What holds this collection together is a single, uncomfortable observation: almost no one who has ever suppressed speech believed they were suppressing speech. They believed they were stopping harm, protecting order, shielding the vulnerable, or just drawing a sensible line. The British editors Orwell wrote about were not villains. They were reasonable professionals who knew what was not done. That is precisely the point. The threat to free expression has rarely come from governments announcing censorship. It has come from institutions, employers, professional associations, and social pressure deciding, quietly and without legislation, that certain things are not said. The quotes above span two and a half centuries and several continents, but they keep returning to this: the mechanism changes, the pattern does not.
If you want one more book after those three, read The Tyranny of Silence by Flemming Rose. Rose was the culture editor of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten who commissioned the Muhammad cartoons in 2005 and spent the following decade thinking carefully about what that decision revealed – about European press freedom, about the difference between legal protection and cultural courage, and about what free speech requires of the people who say they believe in it. It is a more honest account of that episode than most readers have encountered, and it asks the question this entire page is really asking: what does it cost to mean it?