Barack Obama Quotes

Suppressing ideas never makes them go away.

Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.

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

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

The policy of repression of ideas cannot work and has never worked.

Thought that is silenced is always rebellious.

The most fatal blow to progress is slavery of the intellect. The most sacred right of humanity is the right to think, and next to the right to think is the right to express that thought without fear.

The oppression of any people for opinion's sake has rarely had any other effect than to fix those opinions deeper, and render them more important.

You can't crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them.

I mean, I really don't want the federal government to be determining whether or not a person who feels certain ways about the environment or about animals or about certain religious issues should be considered an extremist. That to me is a type of thought control, mind control, which is very dangerous.

I will not attack your doctrines nor your creeds if they accord liberty to me. If they hold thought to be dangerous - if they aver that doubt is a crime, then I attack them one and all, because they enslave the minds of men.

The first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds.

It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion.

The lawsuits we are seeing today to ostracize and prevent different ideas recall previous eras. We must understand that Islam has given man freedom of thought. Islam's history proves that no one is immune to error except the Prophet.

Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even specially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities.

Ideas are dangerous; and the traffic in them has been the concern of all dictators.

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.

In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.

I flatter myself [that we] have in this country [Virginia] extinguished forever the ambitious hope of making laws for the human mind.

This reporter approaches the matter with rather fresh memories of friends in Austria, Germany and Italy who either died or went into exile because they refused to admit the right of their government to determine what they should say, read, write or think…. Movies should be judged by what appears on the screen, newspapers by what appears in print and radio by what comes out of the loudspeaker. The personal beliefs of the individuals involved would not seem to be a legitimate field of inquiry. When bankers, or oil or railroad men are hauled before a congressional committee, it is not customary to question them about their beliefs.

Who dares not speak his free thoughts is a slave.

Those who want to burn books are either afraid of the ideas contained within the covers or they haven't the courage to stand up for the views which they themselves profess to hold.

Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?