Salman Rushdie Quotes

Free speech is not just free speech for people you admire. It's also for people who you think of as reprehensible.

Free speech is intended to protect the controversial and even outrageous word; and not just comforting platitudes too mundane to need protection.

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

One of the problems with defending free speech is you often have to defend people that you find to be outrageous and unpleasant and disgusting.

I won't ever got to a place that's racist, and I will tell everybody else not to and I'll speak against them. But it should be their right to be racist.

Advocates of 'free speech' often repeat the mantra that the best response to bad speech is more and better speech, not the suppression of the bad stuff.

You know, everybody believes in free speech until you start questioning them about it.

Everyone champions freedom of expression in the abstract but few can resist calling for censorship when they do not like what is being expressed.

It's not my place to say if performers of quenelle should be punished.

It's not OK to condone violence because of free speech.

I generally feel that the solution to speech that people find offensive is more speech. You should talk about it, discuss it.

The First Amendment's protections have always put a great deal of responsibility in our hands: not only to respect the power of our own speech, but also to respect that same power in the hands of people we despise.

Take free speech: most of the tough cases on free speech involve very unpleasant people saying very obnoxious things.

Freedom of speech encompasses precisely the freedom to annoy, to ridicule, and to offend.

Freedom of speech doesn't protect speech you like; it protects speech you don't like.

I believe for freedom. I believe that people should express themselves the way they want, except as it does in the way that's not nice, but it is what it is.

I would rather put up with Rush Limbaugh and live in a country where we all do have freedom of speech.

The freedom of speech and the freedom of the press have not been granted to the people in order that they may say things which please, and which are based upon accepted thought, but the right to say the things which displease, the right to say the things which convey the new and yet unexpected thoughts, the right to say things, even though they do a wrong.

Freedom of speech includes the freedom to offend people.

Unfortunately, the problem of the free speech argument is that you have to defend people you can't stand.

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

In America it's live by the sword of freedom of expression and be will to die by it as well.

When controversial speech can be taken offline through pressures on private intermediaries without any kind of due process, that is something we need to be concerned about.

I believe in the freedom of expression, unequivocally - though, as I have written before, I wish more people would understand that freedom of expression is not freedom from consequence.

If Thomas Jefferson had heard us, he probably would have said, 'We shouldn't have free speech.'