Mahatma Gandhi Quotes

What seems fair enough against a squalid huckster of bad liquor may take on a different face, if used by a government determined to suppress political opposition under the guise of sedition

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?

To open his lips is crime in a plain citizen.

Some people still believe you should just fall in line with what's going on - and that's scary. It makes a mockery of freedom of speech.

Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.

When the prison, stake or scaffold can no longer silence the voice of the protesting minority, progress moves on a step, but not until then.

There are no longer opponents of Putin's policy, and if there are, they are mentally ill and should be sent to prophylactic health examination.

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.

That was only the beginning - where one burns books, one will finally also burn people.

Liberty is the very last idea that seems to occur to anybody, in considering any political or social proposal. It is only necessary for anybody for any reason to allege any evidence of any evil in any human practice, for people instantly to suggest that the practice should be suppressed by the police.

None but the dead have free speech.

There are social restrictions where someone could be suppressing someone else's freedom to express themselves.

For an entire populace, change, growth, and spontaneity were dangerous. Acting upon a personal desire, whispering a hidden longing, revealing your true feelings - all the human actions we think of as essential to a character - had be censored by the self lest they be punished by the state.

Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.

When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives.

I hope that I will be the last victim in China's long record of treating words as crimes.

A state that suppresses all freedom of speech, and which by imposing the most terrible punishments, treats each and every attempt at criticism, however morally justified, and every suggestion for improvement as plotting to high treason, is a state that breaks an unwritten law.

The more rulers strive to curtail freedom of speech, the more obstinately are they resisted; …. laws directed against opinions affect the generous minded rather than the wicked, and are adapted less for coercing criminals than for irritating the upright; so that they cannot be maintained without great peril to the state.

It’s often safer to be in chains than to be free.

Only the suppressed word is dangerous.

The National Socialist Party will prevent in the future, by force if necessary, all meetings and lectures which are likely to exercise a depressing influence on the German state.

Today, my freedom as a poet is taken by a censor; tomorrow, my freedom as a citizen will be taken by a policeman. Today I am banished from the theater; tomorrow, I shall be banished from the land. Today, I am gagged; tomorrow, I shall be deported. Today a state of siege exists in literature; tomorrow, it will exist in the city.

Whatever may be the immediate gains and losses, the dangers to our safety arising from political suppression are always greater than the dangers to that safety arising from political freedom.

Every censorship, however good its intent, degenerates inevitably into tyranny.

I was imprisoned for talking.