Saad Eddin Ibrahim Quotes

Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered.

There are men—now in power in this country—who do not respect dissent, who cannot cope with turmoil, and who believe that the people of America are ready to support repression so long as it is done with a quiet voice and a business suit.

In most of the countries where the people don’t like their government, we are now allowed to ask whether people like their government.

Dissidents are despicable parasites

Whenever one tries to suppress doubt, there is tyranny.

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

Once you start choking the space for dissent in a democracy, people feel pushed to the wall and then it leads to further dissent and alienation.

You can't, in the 21st century, continue to live in a system where people live under martial law for 30 years.

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

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

Freedom of speech is always under attack by Fascist mentality, which exists in all parts of the world, unfortunately.

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.

Christ in this country would quite likely have been arrested under the Suppression of Communism Act.

Whatever may be the immediate gains and losses, the dangers to our safety arising from political suppression are always greater than the dangers to that safety arising from political freedom.

It was only a generation ago that we learned that the burning of books may precede the burning of people.

What seems fair enough against a squalid huckster of bad liquor may take on a different face, if used by a government determined to suppress political opposition under the guise of sedition

During Wilson’s presidency, he followed through on an expansive view of Presidential power, suppressing domestic dissent and subversion in a manner that exceeded Dick Cheney’s wildest dreams.

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

For if Men are to be precluded from offering their Sentiments on a matter, which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences, that can invite the consideration of Mankind, reason is of no use to us; the freedom of Speech may be taken away, and, dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep, to the Slaughter.

In those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call anything his own.... Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.

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

Muslims have been subjected to so many tyrants and oppressive regimes. That's what the Arab Spring was about, but the problem comes in trying to direct a revolution.

Even if the country is run by a Mussolini, free speech will find its way.

When a government is in fear of dissent from its own citizens, and when its reaction is to shut out that dissent, we should all worry.

I grew up under a dictatorship. I knew what it meant for people to not have the ability to freely express themselves.