Rowan Atkinson Quotes

I'm from the old school - you go where the power is, and you try to make fun of it. When it becomes off limits to say or do certain things without being brutalized or censored or whatever, it's unfortunate.

If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.

Political satire is a serious thing. In democratic newspapers throughout the world there are daily cartoons that often are not even funny, as is the case especially in many English-language newspapers. Instead, they contain a political message, and the artist takes full responsibility.

Stand-up comedy and comedy in general is the ultimate form of free speech, because you get to poke holes in all the pretentious bubbles politicians and pundits and popes and pretenders try to float over our heads.

One does not arrest Voltaire.

It is worse to suppress dissent than to run the risk of heresy.

One of the jobs of comedy is to expose hypocrisy. When you look at countries like Iran or North Korea that don't have freedom of speech, we who do should push it as far as we need to.

If a culture doesn't allow you to laugh at the leaders or at things that your eyes and ears tell you are actually happening, that's not good.

We must not fall into the trap of thinking speech that offends is speech that must be forbidden. A healthy culture demands that much of us, to equip the next generation of Americans with the knowledge and reason they will need to confront an uncertain future.

In the end, the thing that's important about free expression is that it's the right from which all other rights are derived. If you can't articulate ideas and if you can't articulate critiques of other peoples' ideas, then you're powerless. What always increases the power of an authoritarian regime is whether it can successfully prevent people from expressing themselves.

By going on the defensive. [...] libertarians are, inadvertently, conceding that speech should be policed for propriety, and that those who violate standards set by the PC set are somehow defective on those grounds alone and deserve to be purged from "polite" company.

Poking fun at other people's beliefs, while it may seem frivolous and offensive, is a non-negotiable right. It is a principle that underpins free speech, the basis for progress.

Well, I'm not afraid to say something if I think it's funny, even if it's harsh or racist.

The problem of freedom in America is that of maintaining a competition of ideas, and you do not achieve that by silencing one brand of idea.

I'm not for gratuitous nudity, but if there's humor, I don't have a problem.

I shall stand for freedom of thought and expression in a place where it has been trampled and penalized.

We don't apologize for a joke. We are comics. We are here to make you laugh. If you don't get it, then don't watch us.

Everything needs to be lampooned. I believe that there's not any sacred ground.

Freedom of speech and thought matters, especially when it is speech and thought with which we disagree. The moment the majority decides to destroy people for engaging in thought it dislikes, thought crime becomes a reality.

The clear problem of the outlawing of insult is that too many things can be interpreted as such. Criticism, ridicule, sarcasm, merely stating an alternative point of view to the orthodoxy, can be interpreted as insult.

One has the right to be wrong in a democracy.

If you're going to get into social criticism with absurdity and satire, you can't be politically correct when you do that.

But I think you can make fun of anything as long as it's funny enough.

If liberalism is to mean anything at all, it is duty bound to support without hesitation the dissenting individual over the group, the heretic over the orthodox, innovation over stagnation, and free speech over offense.

It is easy to believe in freedom of speech for those with whom we agree.