Judith Butler Quotes

Being offended by freedom of speech should never be regarded as a justification for violence.

I think it's important, however, that as we again talk about the importance of free speech we make it clear that actions predicated on violent talk are not America they are not who were they are not what we do and they will be prosecuted, so I want that message to be clear also.

No one should ever be hurt or killed for saying, writing or drawing anything.

Who were the fools who spread the story that brute force cannot kill ideas? Nothing is easier. And once they are dead they are no more than corpses.

Madame... I have come from a country where one can be hanged for what one says.

When the guns boom, the arts die.

Let us declare through the public journals of our country, that the question of Slavery is not and shall not be open to discussion; that the system is too deep-rooted among us, and must remain forever; that the very moment any private individual attempts to lecture us upon its evils and immorality, and the necessity of putting means in operation to secure us from them, in the same moment his tongue shall be cut out and cast upon the dunghill.

I was imprisoned for talking.

A university is supposed to show you ideas that offend you and make you feel uncomfortable,

From politics, it was an easy step to silence.

By silencing speech, the new Left makes life more dangerous by leaving violence as the only option. Maybe that's what they want.

Jews have been harmed by the threats to freedom of opinion and debate, the punishments for candor, and the decline in rigorous standards in the academy that have accompanied progressive hegemony, which insists upon the sacrosanct status of affirmative action and other policies favored by the left.

Of all the threats to free speech in history, the one the media give the most credibility to without question is the feminist movement, which is trying to rebrand public debate as harassment.

Show me a university which is a hotbed of thin-skinned offence-taking, where every unacceptable idea is policed and every person who happens to hold one is hounded out of a job, and I will show you a university that isn't a university but an ideological prison camp and indoctrination centre.

Speech is not violence. The Left conflates the two in order to justify its own violent reactions to differing points of view.

I think that some restriction on speech is appropriate.

I don't think it's entirely paranoid to suspect that one day, you won't be able to so much as question the primary tenets of anti-racism without going to jail.

The solution when you don't like someone's speech is not to silence that person, or that corporation. It's more and louder speech of your own.

I no longer believe in freedom of speech.

Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted

None but the dead have free speech.

If it come to prohibiting, there is aught more likely to be prohibited than truth itself.

In America-as elsewhere-free speech is confined to the dead.

Today in many western countries, nobody dares question the Holocaust whose nature is questionable. According to the reports I have received, in America if people decide to write something against homosexuality on the basis of psychological and sociological principles, they will be prevented from publishing their work. How is it that these people feel obligated to respect freedom of expression?

The best answer to bad speech is good speech