Samuel Johnson Quotes
Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it.
Samuel Johnson, 1709-1784, English Writer, Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.d. 1780
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She was dealing with a serious campus situation where an invited speaker, Chief of Police Kelly of New York City was prevented from giving his p resentation on the controversial “Stop and Frisk” rules by student protesters who opposed the practice. Brown’s tradition of hearing anyone on the campus regardless of point of view had been broken to the distress of most students, faculty and alumni.
Hall wrote the above in The Friends of Voltaire as an illustration of Voltaire's beliefs. This quotation – which is sometimes misattributed to Voltaire himself – is often cited to describe the principle of freedom of speech. Hall wrote under a man’s name so that her work would be taken more seriously which it was.
Samuel Johnson, often referred to as Dr Johnson, was an English writer who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor, and lexicographer. Religiously, he was a devout Anglican, and politically a committed Tory. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes Johnson as "arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history". He is the subject of James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson, described by Walter Jackson Bate as "the most famous single work of biographical art in the whole of literature".
