Pat Paulsen Quotes

Our Constitution protects the rights of people to make abject idiots of themselves. 

The Constitution gives every American the inalienable right to make a damn fool of himself.

Prior restraints on speech and publication are the most serious and least tolerable infringement on First Amendment Rights.

You cannot prevent me from talking. I am exercising my right to free speech.

Our privacy, our rights as citizens - these are ideals that we Americans hold very dear.

When you start punishing and censoring comedians, that's a real bad sign of us as Americans losing our First Amendment rights. As a comedian, I'm gonna push the boundaries. Some things you're going to love, and some things you're going to hate. But this is America. Great people died for us to have this right.

I have a personal belief that you never have to give up liberty for security. You can still provide security without sacrificing our Bill of Rights.

We all have the right to call each other names. Rudeness is a deeply held constitutional value.

The freedom to speak is meaningless without the corollary freedom to keep silent.

When I started to write, it was the '70s, and throughout that decade, we didn't have any problems with book challenges or censorship.

I do think that our freedoms are at risk.

I'm not interested in censorship. I like the First Amendment very much.

Americans need to understand the significance of having their civil liberties dismantled. It doesn't just affect terrorists and foreigners, it affects us all.

The last thing the Department of Homeland Security is about is infringing on anybody's constitutionally protected rights.

Americans cherish our liberty and don't want government or corporations to take away our freedoms.

Privacy isn't negotiable. It's the right of every American.

There are hard choices to be made in balancing the country's security and an individual's liberties. But it is a choice that has to be faced.

The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation.

So the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is out there preserving and fighting for, and sometimes winning and sometimes losing, the fight for First Amendment rights in comics and, more generally, for freedom of speech.

People aren't interested in others controlling what they can do or read or see in the privacy of their own homes.

What is also strange to me is that public libraries have always been in the forefront of opposing censorship.

Privacy, in my point of view, is a civil liberty that our Founding Fathers thought of a long time ago and concluded ... was an essential part of what it was to be an American.

There is growing use of government intrusion into your creative space…. The government is able to see more deeply into our intellectual lives.

The 1st Amendment is about how we govern ourselves—not about how we titillate ourselves sexually.

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