Rudolf Ludwig Karl Virchow Quotes

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

Many people I know - writers, poets - they have all been sentenced not once but sometimes three times after they come out. They serve five or six years, come out another time, and then nine years. Come out again, 12 years. Only because they have a different opinion. They are innocent people, they have beautiful minds, beautiful hearts.

Persecution for opinion is the master vice of society.

Heretical views arise when the truth is uncertain, and it is only when the truth is uncertain that censorship is invoked.

What does censorship reveal? It reveals fear.

Christ was crucified for preaching without a police permit

Heretics have been hated from the beginning of recorded time; they have been ostracized, exiled, tortured, maimed, and butchered; but it has generally proved impossible to smother them; and when it has not, the society that has succeeded has always declined.

It is pretty safe to assume that any given censor is a fool. The very fact that he is a censor indicates that.

Whenever one tries to suppress doubt, there is tyranny.

I am sure that as soon as speech was invented, efforts to suppress and control it began, and that process of suppression continues unabated.

Rules about what you can and can’t say often have unintended consequences. … In everything we do, we need to make sure we’re empowering people, not simply reinforcing existing institutions and power structures.

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.

From politics, it was an easy step to silence.

Censors, the whole idea of it, is so childish. You feel like you're talking to hall monitors in school again.

There are people who consider it almost unpatriotic to be inquisitive and to be truthful about your opinions.

The one indisputable reality of dictatorship is that dissent, insult, and malevolent language do not go unpunished if it is allowed at all.

The imprisoning of a writer is the same as the burning of a book.

We can't let censorship take over.

There is nothing more dangerous for a population than self-censorship by fear.

I've been silenced in America.

When a government is in fear of dissent from its own citizens, and when its reaction is to shut out that dissent, we should all worry.

It would be a tragedy for democracy if dissent goes away.

You can't shut somebody up by losing.

Once you start choking the space for dissent in a democracy, people feel pushed to the wall and then it leads to further dissent and alienation.

I prefer a little free speech to no free speech at all; but how many have free speech or the chance or the mind for it; and is not free speech here as elsewhere clamped down on in ratio of its freedom and danger?