Jimmy Carter Quotes

I mean, they censor your work when they're scared of it.

I lived long enough in a society where freedom of speech was nonexistent, and I know what kind of misery that creates - starting with the fact that life becomes very boring for people who just try to survive, and are quiet, and try not to buck the system. And, of course, it can be devastating for people who try to speak against it.

In contrast, fear societies are societies in which dissent is banned.

Persecution is the first law of society because it is always easier to suppress criticism than to meet it.

Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered.

Dissidents are despicable parasites

People like to quiet the speech of others.

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

Locking up dissenters does not reduce dissent - it fosters it.

Censorship always defeats it own purpose, for it creates in the end the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.

Some people still believe you should just fall in line with what's going on - and that's scary. It makes a mockery of freedom of speech.

The first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds.

Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself.

Can someone within that society walk into the town square and say what they want without fear of being punished for his or her views? If so, then that society is a free society. If not, it is a fear society.

We are not allowed to refer to certain things that he does not like.

There is no functional difference between censorship and the threat of censorship.

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.

Heretics have been hated from the beginning of recorded time; they have been ostracized, exiled, tortured, maimed, and butchered; but it has generally proved impossible to smother them; and when it has not, the society that has succeeded has always declined.

Whenever one tries to suppress doubt, there is tyranny.

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

Once you start choking the space for dissent in a democracy, people feel pushed to the wall and then it leads to further dissent and alienation.

All persecution is a sign of fear; for if we did not fear the power of an opinion different from our own, we should not mind others holding it.

The oppression of any people for opinion's sake has rarely had any other effect than to fix those opinions deeper, and render them more important.

Down through the centuries, this trick has been tried by various establishments throughout the world. They force people to get involved in the kind of examination that has only one aim and that is to stamp out dissent.

To silence criticism is to silence freedom.