Larry Craig Quotes

There is no indication - either in the text of the Constitution or in our cases interpreting it - that a separate judicial category exists for the American flag alone. ... We decline ... therefore to create for the flag an exception to the … principles protected by the First Amendment.

Worrying that banning flag desecration would inhibit free speech reveals a misunderstanding of the flag's fundamental nature.

The Supreme Court decision [Texas v. Johnson, 1989] does not in any way indicate the government is backing off from forcing the flag on people. They just don't want to look too dictatorial in the way they do it.

Unfortunately a Constitutional amendment that would have empowered Congress to make desecration of the United States flag illegal failed to pass by one vote.

I think that, as Americans, we should never forget that when we tamper with freedom of speech, it is a very sensitive issue that affects all of our constitutional rights and privileges.

As to the media, they are protected by the First Amendment, as they should be.

Flag desecration is not a constitutional issue for the courts. It is a political one that belongs to the people.

The court has said you are entitled to robust speech on public sidewalks, even insulting speech.

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

The First Amendment is not without limits.

If government were free to suppress disfavored speech by preventing potential speakers from being paid, there would not be much left of the 1st Amendment.

We do not consecrate the flag by punishing its desecration, for in doing so we dilute the freedom that this cherished emblem represents.

Implicit in the history of the 1st Amendment is the rejection of obscenity as utterly without redeeming social importance.

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 Constitution does not allow the unnecessary trammeling of free expression, even for the noblest of purposes.

We do not debar Congress from all action upon the freedom of speech. Legislation that abridges that freedom is forbidden, but not legislation to enlarge and enrich it

If you care for the quality of life in our American democracy, then you have to be for censorship.

As a young constitutional lawyer, I was put to the first amendment test when I was called on to defend racists and neo-Nazis. I really had no choice. Surely now we know that none of us do. Free speech is unequivocal, unpolitical, and indivisible.

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.

If the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech and press is to mean anything, it must allow protests even against the moral code that the standard of the day sets for the community.

Political speech is indispensable to decision-making in a democracy, and this is no less true because the speech comes from a corporation. By taking the right to speak from some and giving it to others, the Government deprives the disadvantaged person or class of the right to use speech to strive to establish worth, standing, and respect for the speaker’s voice. The Government may not by these means deprive the public of the right and privilege to determine for itself what speech and speakers are worthy of consideration. The First Amendment protects speech and speaker, and the ideas that flow from each.

A flag burning Constitutional amendment would rip the fabric of the Constitution at its very center.

Burning the American flag should be punishable by loss of citizenship.

Burn the flag; that's a freedom. Then I have the freedom to take it away from them and tell them how dumb they are.

In the U.S., free speech and the press are protected by the First Amendment. It has a clarity unmatched by modern legislators and declares that 'Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or the press.'