Parker Palmer Quotes

Be alert that dictators have always played on the natural human tendency to blame others and to oversimplify. And don't regard yourself as a guardian of freedom unless you respect and preserve the rights of people you disagree with to free, public, unhampered Expression

I would not wish to live in a world where I could not express my honest opinions. Men who deny to others the right of speech are not fit to live with honest men.

A state of society where men may not speak their minds cannot long endure.

The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.

Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered.

Dissidents are despicable parasites

There is social intimidation by the self-appointed brigades of the thought police… they exist in every society, whether they are of the religious, nationalistic or atheistic variety. Dogmatists, who are convinced that they know better, that only the way they think is acceptable and who would deprive others of their right to hear differing and discordant voices.. They try to achieve this by either silencing the author or scaring away the public.

It is worse to suppress dissent than to run the risk of heresy.

Our showy celebration of, and absolute insistence upon, individual autonomy and unconstrained diversity pushes those by nature least equipped to live comfortably in a liberal democracy not to the limits of their tolerance, but to their intolerant extremes.

Democracy depends on the idea that we hold each others’ right to express ourselves and be heard above our own desire to always get the outcomes we want. You can’t impose tolerance top-down.

[…] the underlying problem is the soft progressive totalitarianism that seeks to compel submission to its creed. A powerful cultural establishment, now reinforced by political dominion in Washington, won’t tolerate deviance. Instead of learning to live at peace with the reality of pluralism, the essence of a successful democracy, it demands concordance with all of its ever-changing strictures. It ascribes dissent not to honest disagreement, differing experiences, diverse intellectual traditions or the basic human instinct for autonomy, but to malice and ignorance.

If the so called 'democratic' individuals out there really believe in their talk about diversity, they should let those with truly different opinions be allowed to talk freely in public, too.

The Left sees no place for differing opinions.

The intolerant man will not rely on persuasion, or on the worth of the idea. He would deny to others the very freedom of opinion or of dissent which he so stridently demands for himself. He cannot trust democracy.

And I think both the left and the right should celebrate people who have different opinions, and disagree with them, and argue with them, and differ with them, but don't just try to shut them up.

It's very worrying at this time in the world that any point of view should be prohibited, that's banned, there are heretics that should be burned at the stake.

Freedom of speech and thought matters, especially when it is speech and thought with which we disagree. The moment the majority decides to destroy people for engaging in thought it dislikes, thought crime becomes a reality.

Will dissent be permitted? The answer to that question will determine whether the society is a free society or a fear society.

I have never written that there is a threat of fascism in America. I always considered the idea overwrought. But now I believe there really is such a threat - and it will come draped not in an American flag, but in the name of tolerance and health.

I always think the true test of free speech is when someone says something you don't like.

It is easy to believe in freedom of speech for those with whom we agree.

What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.

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.

Freedom of speech is always under attack by Fascist mentality, which exists in all parts of the world, unfortunately.

What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long.