Denis Napthine Quotes

Freedom of expression and speech is guaranteed for everyone. However, the excessive use of this right … could represent a threat to social peace and the country’s best interest.

How do we protect free speech, when it may well be seen by the majority of the population as something that undermines the “just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare…? Legislating against free speech is always dangerous. Worse, in some countries and contexts, lawsuits have been used to harass those who hold dissenting or contrarian views.

Conservatives should defend free speech - but we must not amplify it when it's blatantly grotesque.

By placing discretion in the hands of an official to grant or deny a license, such a statute creates a threat of censorship that by its very existence chills free speech.

My view is that good community management is like having good municipal government: You should be able to have dissenting opinions and so on, freedom of speech, but your grandmother should also be able to walk down the street at night without having to worry about getting mugged.

I think free speech is probably the coolest thing we have in this country, and again, you can label it hate speech and dismiss it, and then you're allowed to censor it.

The First Amendment defends all forms of speech including hate speech, which is why groups like Ku Klux Klan are allowed to utter their poisonous remarks.

One of the problems with defending free speech is you often have to defend people that you find to be outrageous and unpleasant and disgusting.

I used to buy into a former Supreme Court justice's argument that you can't scream fire in a crowded theater. Well, I think you can.

In America you can say anything you want - as long as it doesn't have any effect.

So sometimes the facts are good and sometimes the facts are bad, the important thing from the point of view of a principle as broad and important as freedom of speech is that the courts articulate and set forth in a very protective way what those principles are.

I defend both the freedom of expression and society's right to counter it. I must pay the price for differing. It is the natural way of things.

The First Amendment is not without limits.

Advocates of 'free speech' often repeat the mantra that the best response to bad speech is more and better speech, not the suppression of the bad stuff.

I am not content to entrust our free-speech rights to the good graces and whims of Congress and hope that politicians don't abuse their power.

We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country.

Every society has a right to preserve public peace and order, and therefore has a good right to prohibit the propagation of opinions which have a dangerous tendency.

Today I am here to defend the right to offend within the bounds of the law.

No man, who is depending purely upon the words of the Constitution, will ever say that we have unabridged freedom of speech and press so long as there is any law which prescribes a penalty for the utterance of anyone's sentiments …

If you care for the quality of life in our American democracy, then you have to be for censorship.

You cannot allow people to say what they like about race, religion or culture. These cause problems and you are in big trouble.

As an active privilege, it [freedom of speech] ranks with the privilege of committing murder; we may exercise it if we are willing to take the consequences.

We are the only country that allows and protects hate speech.

As a young constitutional lawyer, I was put to the first amendment test when I was called on to defend racists and neo-Nazis. I really had no choice. Surely now we know that none of us do. Free speech is unequivocal, unpolitical, and indivisible.

Yisrael Beiteinu has no objection to the nonviolent expression of opinion. It is violent speech that forms a clear and present danger that we refuse to tolerate.