James Madison Quotes

Despotism can no more exist in a nation until the liberty of the press be destroyed than the night can happen before the sun is set.

Wherever despotism abounds, the sources of public information are the first to be brought under its control. Where ever the cause of liberty is making its way, one of its highest accomplishments is the guarantee of the freedom of the press.

Our political life is closed, and our freedoms usurped, and our people are oppressed, and fearful… if you don’t say what the ruler wants, you’re exiled beyond the sun.

Turkey still has one of the highest number of imprisoned journalists in the world.

We must have a free press. If we are to maintain democracxy as we know it, we must have a free and adversarial press.... That's how dictoators get power [by intimidating, restriciting and censoring the press.]

The government that has imprisoned more journalists than any other in the world was democratically elected.

Some of the press who speak loudly about the freedom of the press are themselves the enemies of freedom. Countless people dare not say a thing because they know it will be picked up and made a song of by the press. That limits freedom.

It should be clear by now that my focus here is not freedom of speech or the press. This freedom is all too often an exaggeration. At the very least, blind references to freedom of speech or the press serve as a distraction from the critical examination of other communications policies.

When someone has to intervene to defend the liberty of the press, that society is sick.

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

The media bring our wars home, but only rarely have they been able to do it in complete freedom.

One of the unsung freedoms that go with a free press is the freedom not to read it.

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.

Numerous politicians have seized absolute power and muzzled the press. Never in history has the press seized absolute power and muzzled the politicians.

The freedom of the press works in such a way that there is not much freedom from it.

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

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.

A free press can of course be good or bad, but most certainly, without freedom it will never be anything but bad.

Of all the tyrannies of humankind, the worst is that which persecutes the mind.

An attempt to scrutinize men’s thoughts and punish their opinions is of all kinds of despotism the most odious: yet this is peculiarly character of a period of revolution.... There is no period more at war with the existence of liberty.

When despots rule, cartoonists die.

For thirty years the press has ceased to exist in Turkey. There are indeed newspapers, many of them even, but the scissors of censorship cut them in so emasculating a manner that they no longer have any potency. If I dare, I would call them gelded newspapers or rather, to keep the local color, eunuchs.

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.

There is nothing so fretting and vexatious, nothing so justly TERRIBLE to tyrants, and their tools and abettors, as a FREE PRESS.

A free press may be good or bad, but without freedom a press can only be bad.