Liu Xiaobo Quotes
Free expression is the base of human rights, the root of human nature and the mother of truth. To kill free speech is to insult human rights, to stifle human nature and to suppress truth.
Liu, Xiaobo. No Enemies, No Hatred: Selected Essays and Poems. Edited by Perry Link, Tienchi Martin-Liao, and Liu Xia, Harvard University Press, 2012.
Spinoza’s ideas were considered so radical and dangerous that he was the only man in history who was excommunicated by the Catholics, the Jews and the Muslims.
This was a decade before the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. You can imagine the distress of Vermonters when the U. S. Constitution was written with no provision for absolute freedom of speech which they had had for a over a decade. They would not ratify the U, S, Constitution without the understanding that there would be a Bill of Rights added with the First Amendment.
Spinoza’s ideas were considered so radical and dangerous that he was the only man in history who was excommunicated by the Catholics, the Jews and the Muslims. However, we see in Spinoza the observations and foundations of what would become American and then international views of human rights.
This is a typical statement of human rights policy by many countries. Essentially, some controlling authority states that rights are guaranteed except when it is “dangerous” or contrary to the country’s “best interest”. Of course then anything the authorities want to censor is classified so that it is an exception. To be a right, it must be guaranteed even when hateful, insulting and/or dangerous.
Liu Xiaobo was a Chinese writer, literary critic, human rights activist, philosopher and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who called for political reforms and was involved in campaigns to end communist one-party rule in China. He was incarcerated as a political prisoner in Jinzhou, Liaoning. On 26 June 2017, he was granted medical parole after being diagnosed with liver cancer, and died on 13 July 2017.
