Sheldon Whitehouse Quotes

We want to protect freedom of speech, but it is not unlimited freedom of speech. There has always been rules around defamation, slander and libel, and in Victoria, we have effective rules on racial and religious vilification.

Freedom of speech is freedom to offend.

You can't just slander someone, defame them, lie about them. You can't incite people to crime. There's all sorts of reasonable restrictions on free speech that are already codified in the British common-law system.

Freedom of speech should be wide open as long as it doesn't incite violence.

You can't call someone a fraud, a liar, and a fake and hide under the First Amendment.

The First Amendment was designed to protect offensive speech, because nobody ever tries to ban the other kind.

I'm quite sure that no court is telling anybody that they cannot say whatever they want to say.

There are more ways of outraging speech than contradiction merely.

The government would be able to go to court with respect to newspaper articles, broadcast pieces and the like that they thought were bad or harmful or even against the government and try to block them.

The First Amendment defends all forms of speech including hate speech, which is why groups like Ku Klux Klan are allowed to utter their poisonous remarks.

We won't tolerate abuses and crimes made every day in the name of freedom of speech. That is freedom of extortion and blackmail.

While we as members of the Coalition strongly support free speech, it is not unlimited free speech. People aren't free to vilify others on the basis of race or religion.

The limit of freedom of expression is the point at which there is an attempt to harm a person or a country.

[E]rroneous statement … must be protected if the freedoms of expression are to be given the breathing space that they need ... to survive.

Most of us will agree that the right to say anything anywhere, no matter what the consequences, is carrying the right to free expression a bit too far. We run into controversy, however, when we try to draw the line between protected free expression and the kind of expression that should be prohibited because of the potential harm that it can do.

We are the only country that allows and protects hate speech.

Under the privilege of the 1st Amendment many, many ridiculous things are said.

I'd like to see people get sued if they wrote a bad review of my movie. If you can't say something nice, you shouldn't say anything at all.

The intelligent defense of free speech should not rest on the notion that we must tolerate every form of speech, no matter how offensive. It's that we should lean toward greater tolerance for speech we dislike, and reserve our harshest penalties only for the worst offenders.

You can call someone a lousy writer. You can say you hate their book. You can even call a person 'white trash' but you can't go on television and slander a person's career. It's illegal, even on reality shows.

Take free speech: most of the tough cases on free speech involve very unpleasant people saying very obnoxious things.

First Amendment freedoms are most in danger when the government seeks to control thought or to justify its laws for that impermissible end. The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought.

Free speech is intended to protect the controversial and even outrageous word; and not just comforting platitudes too mundane to need protection.

Political truth is libel; religious truth, blasphemy.

You can't come up and attack someone because of free speech.