Terry Tempest Williams Quotes

I do not favor the gag order.

To silence criticism is to silence freedom.

In our period, they say there is free speech. They say there is no penalty for poets, There is no penalty for writing poems. They say this. This is the penalty.

When you have a person in power who punishes people for speaking their mind, it's truly dangerous.

Only the suppressed word is dangerous.

Everyone loses when voices get stifled.

The loudest voice in the room, sometimes, is the absent voice of the silenced.

There's really no such thing as the 'voiceless'. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.

Where silence is not allowed, what then is permissible?

There are social restrictions where someone could be suppressing someone else's freedom to express themselves.

Truth can be outraged by silence quite as cruelly as by speech.

Pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds.

An understanding of Sor Juana's work must include an understanding of the prohibitions her work confronts. Her speech leads us to what cannot be said, what cannot be said to an orthodoxy, the orthodoxy to a tribunal, and the tribunal to a sentence.

Whenever anyone challenges anything, the powers that be try to paint them as extremists or radicals or whatever. And I think that's actually nonsense.

Children say that people are hung sometimes for speaking the truth.

Telling writers to shut up is a sure way to keep them talking.

Every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.

Silence the voices of some in order to hear the voices of others. Sometimes there is no other way.

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.

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.

I was imprisoned for talking.

Suppressing ideas never makes them go away.

Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.

People like to quiet the speech of others.

From politics, it was an easy step to silence.