Orrin Hatch Quotes

Implicit in the history of the 1st Amendment is the rejection of obscenity as utterly without redeeming social importance.

If the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech and press is to mean anything, it must allow protests even against the moral code that the standard of the day sets for the community.

I can only assume that your editorial writer tripped over the First Amendment and thought it was the office cat.

Apropos of the agitation for abolishing the Censor in England, it occurred to me that not even the advocates of freedom seek to justify the free treatment of sexual matters in any other than a high moral-pointing vein. The notion that sexual themes might allowably be treated in the mere aim of amusement does not seem to have occurred to anybody at all.

If you care for the quality of life in our American democracy, then you have to be for censorship.

The standard of what offends 'the common conscience of the community' conflicts ... with the command of the First Amendment. ... Certainly that standard would not be an acceptable one if religion, economics, politics or philosophy were involved. How does it become a constitutional standard when literature treating with sex is concerned? Any test that turns on what is offensive to the community's standards is too loose, too capricious, too destructive of freedom of expression to be squared with the First Amendment. Under that test, juries can censor, suppress, and punish what they don't like, provided the matter relates to 'sexual impurity' or has a tendency to 'excite lustful thoughts.' This is community censorship in one of its worst forms...

Although I may find the type of programming seen during the 2004 Super Bowl and the 2003 Golden Globe Awards disgusting and disturbing, we must always work hard to defend the cherished freedoms so clearly outlined in our Constitution, including a healthy and free press.

I think free speech is probably the coolest thing we have in this country, and again, you can label it hate speech and dismiss it, and then you're allowed to censor it.

I think that, as Americans, we should never forget that when we tamper with freedom of speech, it is a very sensitive issue that affects all of our constitutional rights and privileges.

Free speech rights means that government officials are barred from creating lists of approved and disapproved political ideas and then using the power of the state to enforce those preferences.

I used to buy into a former Supreme Court justice's argument that you can't scream fire in a crowded theater. Well, I think you can.

People may be due the benefits of a democratic electoral process. But in the United States, content curators appropriately have a First Amendment right to present their content as they see fit.

Free speech is meant to protect unpopular speech. Popular speech, by definition, needs no protection.

The Libertarian position on the freedom of speech is a strong support of freedom of speech, and we oppose government intervention in controlling what is or is not moral.

The First Amendment is not without limits.

I am not content to entrust our free-speech rights to the good graces and whims of Congress and hope that politicians don't abuse their power.

Any kind of restrictions put on free speech would have worse consequences than bullying.

If government were free to suppress disfavored speech by preventing potential speakers from being paid, there would not be much left of the 1st Amendment.

The 1st Amendment is about how we govern ourselves—not about how we titillate ourselves sexually.

If you don't think a television news show represents the truth, you can turn off your TV. If you don't think a magazine represents the truth, you can cancel your subscription. You have the right to expose yourself to whatever information you want. But to have the government prescribing what the truth is or limiting the information available for the citizen is contrary to the 1st Amendment.

If the 1st Amendment means anything, it means that the state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch.

If one seeks to disseminate his ideas by means of periodicals or pamphlets, the post-office officials may decline to transmit anything that does not suit their taste; and the courts have decided that the United States post-office has precisely the same right to refuse to carry The Masses that it has to exclude sulfuric acid and dynamite from the mails.

Prior restraints on speech and publication are the most serious and least tolerable infringement on First Amendment Rights.

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.

Political speech is indispensable to decision-making in a democracy, and this is no less true because the speech comes from a corporation. By taking the right to speak from some and giving it to others, the Government deprives the disadvantaged person or class of the right to use speech to strive to establish worth, standing, and respect for the speaker’s voice. The Government may not by these means deprive the public of the right and privilege to determine for itself what speech and speakers are worthy of consideration. The First Amendment protects speech and speaker, and the ideas that flow from each.