Barack Obama Quotes

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.]

We cannot have a society in which some dictator somewhere can impose censorship here in the United States.

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.

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

A state that suppresses all freedom of speech, and which by imposing the most terrible punishments, treats each and every attempt at criticism, however morally justified, and every suggestion for improvement as plotting to high treason, is a state that breaks an unwritten law.

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

As I speak to you today, government censors somewhere are working furiously to erase my words from the records of history. But history itself has already condemned these tactics.

In a fascist shift, reporters start to face more and more harassment, and they have to be more and more courageous simply in order to do their jobs.

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 despots rule, cartoonists die.

The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing.

Be alert that dictators have always played on the natural human tendency to blame others and to oversimplify. And don't regard yourself as a guardian of freedom unless you respect and preserve the rights of people you disagree with to free, public, unhampered Expression

There is social intimidation by the self-appointed brigades of the thought police… they exist in every society, whether they are of the religious, nationalistic or atheistic variety. Dogmatists, who are convinced that they know better, that only the way they think is acceptable and who would deprive others of their right to hear differing and discordant voices.. They try to achieve this by either silencing the author or scaring away the public.

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

I have no problem with free speech, but free speech and then silencing your opposition - boy, I have a problem with that.

I grew up under a dictatorship. I knew what it meant for people to not have the ability to freely express themselves.

Those who criticize Putin are not human: they are my personal enemies.

History's lesson, of course, is that attempts to suppress free expression have merely confirmed the caricaturists' original critique of heavy-handed and objectionable actions of overreaching governments.

In the same way that Egypt and Libya conspired to 'disappear' my father and silence writers such as Idris Ali, they made me, too, to a far lesser extent, feel punished for speaking out.

Freedom of speech and of the press are essential to the enlightenment of a free people and in restraining those who wield power.

In Czechoslovakia there is no such thing as freedom of the press. In the United States there is no such thing as freedom from the press.

It [defending Salmon Rushdie] was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual and the defense of free expression.

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

How anybody expects a man to stay in business with every two-bit wowser in the country claiming a veto over what we can say and can't say and what we can show and what we can't show - it's enough to make you throw up. The whole principle is wrong; it's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak.

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