Richard Stallman Quotes

A law which attempts to say you can criticise and ridicule ideas as long as they are not religious ideas is a very peculiar law indeed.

Not every obnoxious talk leads to progress, but we cannot tell which unusual idea, which seditious thought will be tomorrow's accepted truth and enshrined right ... after all, all that we take for granted, was once deemed extremely objectionable... So, not knowing where the next big step in the progress of human civilization will come from, we open our ears, our minds and our hearts to the new, the unusual and the contrarian.

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

A university is supposed to show you ideas that offend you and make you feel uncomfortable,

In the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day ... a selection dictated by fashion and the need to match mass standards frequently prevents independent-minded people from giving their contribution to public life.

Freedom of ideas and communications is one of the things we are fighting for, and our enemies are fighting against.

I have always believed in the marketplace of ideas.

Librarians see themselves as the guardians of the First Amendment. You got a thousand Mother Joneses at the barricades! I love the librarians, and I am grateful for them!

It distresses me deeply that ideas are not to be circulated freely in the USA if certain persons have their way. One of the things that was great about this country was that I could say anything and that everyone else could say anything and we would compare all possible ideas and arrive at opinions.

This generation is frightened of ideas, or at least it's being suppressed.

The real heroes are the librarians and teachers who at no small risk to themselves refuse to lie down and play dead for censors.

I'm as against restricting access to drugs as I am to burning books. It offends me in the same way.

Libraries should be open to all - except the censor. [Response to questionnaire in Saturday Review, October 29 1960]

But once a culture develops sufficiently to become skeptical, the idea of censorship becomes less attractive. To suppress a book or a picture or a sculpture or a play or a film is a terrible act of aggression against the artist who created it. This is a miming of capital punishment; it destroys the life that has been emanated by a life.

You know, the Philistines have long since discarded the rack and stake as a means of suppressing the opinions they feared: they've discovered a much more deadly weapon of destruction -- the wisecrack.

By putting these sort of lines around what ideas are proper or improper, we lose things.

The pressure to make public retractions of past statements - there's something medieval about it. What does it mean, anyway, to 'retract' what you've said? How can anyone state categorically that a thought he once had is no longer valid? In modern times an idea can be refuted, yes, but not retracted.

You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.

Eternal vigilance must be maintained to guard against those who seek to stifle ideas, establish a narrow orthodoxy, and divide our nation along arbitrary lines of race, ethnicity, and religious belief or non-belief.

The attempt to suppress an idea has always and everywhere proved a failure.

We are free to burn the Qur’an or any other book, and to criticize Muhammad or any other human being. Let no one forget it.

Men of ideas vanish when freedom vanishes.

Libraries should be open to all - except the censor.

I am opposed to censorship. Censors are pretty sure fools. I have no confidence in the suppression of everyday facts.

It [defending Salmon Rushdie] was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual and the defense of free expression.