Aesop Quotes

Repression or oppression never yet succeeded in crushing the truth or redressing a wrong.

People are hung sometimes for speaking the truth.

The enemies of freedom do not argue; they shout and they shoot.

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

Intellectuals try to keep going. But their situation is very difficult. Those who have had the courage to voice their opposition have often paid a very high price.

When you have a person in power who punishes people for speaking their mind, it's truly dangerous.

The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.

In Russia all tyrants believe poets to be their worst enemies.

Children say that people are hung sometimes for speaking the truth.

Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.

This power, this authority, Soviet power: they killed everybody who could make any resistance, who could explain his own way of thinking and who could follow his own way of thinking, of believing.

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.

Only the suppressed word is dangerous.

The limits of tyrants are proscribed by the endurance of those whom they suppress.

Many who tried to enlighten were hanged from the lamppost.

When despots rule, cartoonists die.

The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing.

… to gag us from speaking truth, and discovering the tyrannies of bad men.

I was imprisoned for talking.

Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.

Dissenters will become food for crocodiles.

Let the guarantee of free speech be in every man's determination to use it, and we shall have no need of paper declarations. On the other hand, so long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.

Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.

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