Abe Fortas Quotes

The censor is always quick to justify his function in terms that are protective of society. But the First Amendment, written in terms that are absolute, deprives the States of any power to pass on the value, the propriety, or the morality of a particular expression.

I think the most un-American thing you can say is, 'You can't say that.'

Free speech is meant to protect unpopular speech. Popular speech, by definition, needs no protection.

You can't cheer when political officials punish the expression of views you dislike and then expect to be taken seriously when you wrap yourself in the banner of free speech in order to protest state punishment of views you like and share.

If the 1st Amendment means anything, it means that the state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch.

The First Amendment is national in scope and, as the Supreme Court said in Tinker, it does not stop at the schoolhouse door. Not all children are the same. Is a 17-year-old on the eve of his 18th birthday the same as a five-year-old? It is not the responsibility of librarians, or online content providers for that matter, to determine what is appropriate.

While the Executive may exclude an alien for almost any reason, it cannot do so solely because the Executive disagrees with the contents of the alien’s speech and therefore wants to prevent the alien from sharing this speech with a willing American audience.

Incitement is a form of expression. How do we curb that without getting onto the slippery slope of curtailing all dissent and all troubling and contrarian speech?

For the first time in the 182 years since the founding if the Republic, the federal courts are asked to hold that the First Amendment does not mean what it says.

If there is a bedrock principle of the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.

We have the First Amendment to rely on whenever an elected official tries to impinge on our rights to speak.

Censorship is certainly not the answer to controversial material and is inconsistent with our most basic constitutional values.

I just think political correctness is a limitation on our First Amendment freedoms.

Individuals have a right to freedom of speech.

Americans have fought and died around the globe to protect the right of all people to express their views, even views that we profoundly disagree with. We do not do so because we support hateful speech, but because our founders understood that without such protections, the capacity of each individual to express their own views and practice their own faith may be threatened. We do so because in a diverse society, efforts to restrict speech can quickly become a tool to silence critics and oppress minorities.

I assume that those who cling to old beliefs will be able to whisper their thoughts in the recesses of their homes, but if they repeat those views in public, they will risk being labeled as bigots and treated as such by governments, employers, and schools.

The dominant purpose of the First Amendment was to prohibit the widespread practice of government suppression of embarrassing information.

I believe America went wrong in terms of respecting the First Amendment, the state of free speech on American college campuses and on the media and in academia.

It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.

Free speech not only lives, it rocks!

The First Amendment gives all of us - it gives it to me, it gives it to you, it gives all Americans - the right to speak our minds freely. It gives you the right and me the right to criticize fake news, and criticize it strongly.

You watch the Supreme Court in action on these cases, and they are a conflicted court. However, when it comes to speech issues generally, the court has been protective.

Criticism of government finds sanctuary in several portions of the 1st Amendment. It is part of the right of free speech. It embraces freedom of the press.

I'm not interested in censorship. I like the First Amendment very much.

I try to do that in this book without preaching - to try to do as you just said that you really have to defend the First Amendment rights of everybody.