Fidel Castro Quotes

The uniformity and obedience of the media, which any dictator would admire...

Wherever despotism abounds, the sources of public information are the first to be brought under its control.

truth ... is the first casualty of tyranny.

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.

When a person goes to a country and finds their newspapers filled with nothing but good news, he can bet there are good men in jail.

… to gag us from speaking truth, and discovering the tyrannies of bad men.

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.]

They have been talking about a dictatorship and they were right because there's a dictatorship and there's a government that has been fighting that dictatorship, the dictatorship of the media.

It is a paradox that every dictator has climbed to power on the ladder of free speech. Immediately on attaining power each dictator has suppressed all free speech except his own.

Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.

Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the '30s, East Germany in the '50s, Czechoslovakia in the '60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the '70s, China in the '80s and '90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists.

This is probably my last free statement through our news media, where the radio and television are already under the heel of the ruling political party of Prime Minister Robert Mugabe. One would have thought radio and television were enough as propaganda tools.

The state must not ... let itself be confused by the drivel about so-called "freedom of the press," ... it must make sure of this instrument of popular education, and place it in the service of the state.

The freedom of the press throughout the world where the capitalists rule, is the freedom to buy up papers, the freedom to buy writers, to buy and manufacture public opinion in the interest of the capitalists.

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

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

When the media goes state and becomes nothing more than an echo chamber for the government, the task of sharing truth falls to the original keepers of liberty: the American people.

If I were to give liberty to the press, my power could not last three days.

[Vladimir] Putin is an enemy of the free press. The U.S. celebrates free press.

The control of information is something the elite always does, particularly in a despotic form of government. Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people.

It is not true that virtually all news in a totalitarian state is false.

Secrecy is the freedom tyrants dream of.

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.

One certain effect of war is to diminish freedom of expression.

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