James Madison Quotes

Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds.

I will not attack your doctrines nor your creeds if they accord liberty to me. If they hold thought to be dangerous - if they aver that doubt is a crime, then I attack them one and all, because they enslave the minds of men.

No more fatuous chimera ever infected the brain of man than that you can control opinions by law or direct belief by statute.

Of all the tyrannies of humankind, the worst is that which persecutes the mind.

You have no right to erect your toll gate upon the highways of thought.

I deny the right of any man, of any number of men, of any church, of any State, to put a padlock on the lips — to make the tongue a convict. I passionately deny the right of the Herod of authority to kill the children of the brain.

I shall stand for freedom of thought and expression in a place where it has been trampled and penalized.

To become self-aware, people must be allowed to hear a plurality of opinions and then make up their own minds. They must be allowed to say, write and publish whatever they want. Freedom of expression is the most basic, but fundamental, right. Without it, human beings are reduced to automatons.

Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail.

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.

I mean, I really don't want the federal government to be determining whether or not a person who feels certain ways about the environment or about animals or about certain religious issues should be considered an extremist. That to me is a type of thought control, mind control, which is very dangerous.

When Men are not allowed to think freely about chemistry and biology, why should they be allowed to think freely about political philosophy?

This reporter approaches the matter with rather fresh memories of friends in Austria, Germany and Italy who either died or went into exile because they refused to admit the right of their government to determine what they should say, read, write or think…. Movies should be judged by what appears on the screen, newspapers by what appears in print and radio by what comes out of the loudspeaker. The personal beliefs of the individuals involved would not seem to be a legitimate field of inquiry. When bankers, or oil or railroad men are hauled before a congressional committee, it is not customary to question them about their beliefs.

We cannot allow political pressure from critics of unpopular ideas to inhibit the free exchange of ideas.

Suppressing ideas never makes them go away.

Who dares not speak his free thoughts is a slave.

Liberty of thinking, and of expressing our thoughts, is always fatal to priestly power…

If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a State has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch. Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds.

When people talk of the freedom of writing, speaking, or thinking, I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists; but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more.

To preserve the freedom of the human mind then and freedom of the press, every spirit should be ready to devote itself to martyrdom; for as long as we may think as we will, and speak as we think, the condition of man will proceed in improvement.

The most fatal blow to progress is slavery of the intellect. The most sacred right of humanity is the right to think, and next to the right to think is the right to express that thought without fear.

To be able to think freely, a man must be certain that no consequence will follow whatever he writes.

The priceless heritage of our society is the unrestricted constitutional right of each member to think as he will. Thought control is a copyright of totalitarianism, and we have no claim to it.

Literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes.

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.